Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Extracted Countless of Music Files from Spotify
A digital rights group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 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 start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
