A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
