🔗 Share this article Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Scraped Millions of Music Files from Spotify An activist organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly. Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models. An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire catalog. “We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson. The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections. Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns 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 pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music. The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online. “Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”. Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems. “Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said. The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems. The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”. Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other. Government Considerations and Responses In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns. The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.