An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be utilized for developing AI models.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
