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An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.

Possible Boost for AI Training

Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to train their technology.

An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its full catalog.

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

The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.

Archive's Declared Mission 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 providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.

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

“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.

Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground

Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.

“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.

The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.

The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.

Copyright has become a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.

Government Proposals and Responses

In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.

A government minister for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little 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 next year.