🔗 Share this article Activist Collective Claims to Have Extracted Millions of Music Tracks from Spotify An activist group has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online. Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models. A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog. “We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative. The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections. Archive's Stated Mission and Worries The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music. They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data files online. “Naturally 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 information and heritage”. AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems. “Training on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said. The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models. A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”. Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other. Government Considerations and Reactions In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns. A government minister for technology, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.