An activist group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries 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 were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken 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.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development told 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 committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
