Advocacy Group Asserts to Have Scraped Millions of Audio Files from Spotify
An activist group has stated to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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 represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
