🔗 Share this article Activist Group Claims to Have Scraped Countless of Audio Tracks from Spotify A digital rights group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly. Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for material to train their technology. A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory. “We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative. The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management]. Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns Spotify does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music. The group asserted 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 Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”. Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems. “Training on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread 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 huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems. A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”. Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other. Government Proposals and Reactions Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions. A government minister for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.