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An activist group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.

Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training

Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to train their technology.

A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.

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

The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.

Archive's Declared Mission and Worries

The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.

They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.

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

Model Development and Copyright Debate

A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.

The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.

The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.

Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.

Government Proposals and Responses

In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.

The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.