Activist Collective Asserts to Have Extracted Millions of Audio Tracks from the Streaming Giant
A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for data to train their models.
An entity called 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. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to develop its systems.
The co-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 the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
