An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms 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 entries of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing 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 knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
