A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Observers said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based 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 tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering 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 streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, 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 archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology 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 regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
