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An activist organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.

Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development

Industry experts said the apparent data breach could boost AI companies searching for data 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 record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its full catalog.

“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.

The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.

Archive's Stated Mission 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 providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.

The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.

“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.

Model Development and Copyright Debate

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

“Training on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.

The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.

A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.

Government Proposals and Responses

In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.

A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.