Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Extracted Millions of Audio Files from Spotify

An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.

Possible Boost for AI Training

Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.

An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify 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 constitute its full catalog.

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

The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns

Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.

They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, 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,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.

AI Training and Copyright Battleground

A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Training on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he said.

The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.

A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of the service”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.

Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.

Government Considerations and Responses

In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow 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’ apprehensions.

A government minister for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.