Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Extracted Millions of Audio Tracks from the Streaming Giant

A digital rights organization has stated to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.

Possible Impetus for AI Development

Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could boost AI companies searching for material to train their models.

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

“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.

The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Group's Stated Mission and Worries

The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.

They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data 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 “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.

Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground

A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.

“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he said.

The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.

A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern 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.

Policy Considerations and Responses

In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.

The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.