An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service 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 culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting 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.
