A digital rights group has stated to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing 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 its listeners and would be shared 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,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
