Activist Collective Claims to Have Extracted Millions of Audio Tracks from the Streaming Giant
An activist organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to develop its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
