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A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.

Potential Impetus for AI Development

Observers said the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to develop their models.

An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.

“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.

The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].

Archive's Stated Goal and Worries

Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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 audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.

“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.

Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground

Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be used for training AI models.

“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread 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 vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.

The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.

Policy Considerations and Responses

In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported 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 “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.