An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Observers said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed 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 beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
