Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Scraped Millions of Music Tracks from the Streaming Giant
An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious 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 investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known 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 streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
