An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Training on pirated material 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 a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
