Advocacy Group Claims to Have Extracted Countless of Audio Files from the Streaming Giant

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

Potential Boost for AI Training

Industry experts noted the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for material to train their technology.

An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its full inventory.

“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.

The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].

Group's Declared Goal and Concerns

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

They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing 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 describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.

AI Training and Copyright Battleground

Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training AI models.

“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.

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

A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.

Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.

Policy Proposals and Reactions

Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.

A government minister for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.