An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Observers said the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
