A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also allow 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.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
