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A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.

Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development

Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their technology.

A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.

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

The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.

Group's Stated Goal and Worries

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

The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.

“Naturally 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 knowledge and culture”.

AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground

A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.

“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he said.

The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.

The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.

Government Proposals and Responses

In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.

A government minister for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.