An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, research 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 administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
