An activist group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not believe 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be utilized for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
