Activist Group Asserts to Have Extracted Countless of Music Files from Spotify
An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
