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A digital rights organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.

Potential Boost for AI Training

Observers noted the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for material to train their technology.

A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.

“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.

The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Group's Declared Goal and Worries

The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.

They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.

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

Model Development and Copyright Debate

A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Training on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.

The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.

A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.

Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.

Government Proposals and Responses

In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.

A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.