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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 release them online.

Potential Impetus for AI Training

Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models.

An entity called 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 hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.

“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved 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 employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].

Group's Declared Mission and Worries

Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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 claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.

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

Model Development and Copyright Battleground

A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training AI models.

“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.

The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.

A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.

Policy Considerations and Reactions

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

The secretary of state for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.