Activist Group Asserts to Have Scraped Countless of Music Tracks from the Streaming Giant
A digital rights group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Observers said the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 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 songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service 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, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of the service”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models 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 AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
