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A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.

Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development

Observers noted the apparent leak could aid AI companies searching for data to train their technology.

A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full inventory.

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

The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].

Archive's Declared Mission and Worries

Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released 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 claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging 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 describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.

Model Development and Copyright Debate

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

“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.

The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.

A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.

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

Policy Considerations and Responses

In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.

The secretary of state for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.