🔗 Share this article Activist Collective Claims to Have Extracted Countless of Music Files from the Streaming Giant An activist group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly. Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development Observers said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for data to train their technology. An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, 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 company representative. The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management]. Group's Declared Goal and Worries Spotify 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 ‘historical repository’ for music. The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online. “Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”. AI Training and Copyright Debate Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be used for training AI models. “Training on pirated material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said. The Anna’s Archive site 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. The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”. Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other. Government Considerations and Reactions Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns. A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.