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A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to release them publicly.

Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training

Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.

An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.

“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.

The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Archive'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 copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.

The group asserted 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 exchanging large data files online.

“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.

AI Training and Copyright Battleground

Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said.

The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged 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 “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.

Policy Proposals and Reactions

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

A government minister for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.