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An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.

Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development

Observers noted the apparent data breach could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their technology.

A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.

“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.

The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Group's Stated Mission and Concerns

The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.

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

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

Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate

Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.

The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.

The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.

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

Government Proposals and Responses

In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.

The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.