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A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.

Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development

Observers said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to develop their technology.

An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.

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

The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Archive's Stated Goal and Worries

Spotify does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.

The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging 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 frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.

AI Training and Copyright Battleground

A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.

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

A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.

Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.

Government Considerations and Responses

Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.

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