An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted 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 method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize 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.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
