🔗 Share this article Advocacy Group Asserts to Have Scraped Millions of Music Files from the Streaming Giant A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly. Possible Boost for AI Development Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for data to train their models. An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire catalog. “We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative. The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections. Archive's Declared Goal and Worries Spotify does not think the audio taken 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 ‘historical repository’ for music. They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users 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 start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”. AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems. “Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said. The group's website makes references to LibGen, 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 posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”. Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other. Policy Proposals and Reactions Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns. A government minister for science, 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 pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.