Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Scraped Millions of Music Files from the Streaming Giant

An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.

Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training

Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for data to train their technology.

An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.

“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.

The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Archive's Declared Goal and Worries

Spotify does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering 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 streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.

“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.

Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate

A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.

The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.

The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.

Policy Considerations and Reactions

Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.

A government minister for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.