An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think 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 ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing 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 mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
