Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Scraped Countless of Audio Tracks from the Streaming Giant
A digital rights group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Observers noted the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music taken 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 ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
