A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Observers said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data 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 metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
