An activist organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers said the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for data to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
