An activist group has stated to have scraped millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
