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A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.

Possible Impetus for AI Training

Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for data to develop their technology.

An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.

“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.

The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].

Group's Declared Goal and Concerns

Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.

They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.

“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.

Model Development and Copyright Battleground

A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.

“Educating models on pirated material is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.

The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to develop 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 private free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.

Government Considerations and Responses

In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.

The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.