A digital rights organization has stated to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies looking for data to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital 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 “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of Spotify”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology 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 committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
