An activist organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of the service”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
