An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for data to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website 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.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
