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An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.

Potential Impetus for AI Training

Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their models.

A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.

“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.

The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.

Group's Declared Mission and Concerns

The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.

The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large digital 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 purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.

AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate

A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.

“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.

The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.

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

Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.

Policy Proposals and Reactions

In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.

The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.