{"id":362221,"date":"2025-12-22T18:39:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T18:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/362221\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T18:39:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T18:39:18","slug":"activist-group-says-it-has-scraped-86m-music-files-from-spotify-spotify","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/362221\/","title":{"rendered":"Activist group says it has scraped 86m music files from Spotify | Spotify"},"content":{"rendered":"

An activist group has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify<\/a> and is preparing to release them online.<\/p>\n

Observers said the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.<\/p>\n

A group called Anna\u2019s Archive said it had scraped 86m music files from Spotify and 256m rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100m tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.<\/p>\n

The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700m users worldwide, said it had \u201cidentified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn investigation into unauthorised access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management] to access some of the platform\u2019s audio files. We are actively investigating the incident,\u201d said Spotify.<\/p>\n

Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna\u2019s Archive has been released yet. Anna\u2019s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a \u201c\u2018preservation archive\u2019 for music\u201d.<\/p>\n

The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via \u201ctorrents\u201d, a means of sharing large digital files online.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course Spotify doesn\u2019t have all the music in the world, but it\u2019s a great start,\u201d said Anna\u2019s Archive<\/a>, which describes its mission as \u201cpreserving humanity\u2019s knowledge and culture\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith your help, humanity\u2019s musical heritage will be forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts and other catastrophes,\u201d said the group.<\/p>\n

Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and campaigner for protecting artists\u2019 copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing AI models.<\/p>\n

\u201cTraining on pirated material is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models. This is why governments must insist AI companies reveal the training data they use,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Anna\u2019s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Meta to train its AI models. According to a US court filing<\/a>, Zuckerberg, Meta\u2019s founder and chief executive, approved use of the LibGen dataset despite warnings within the company\u2019s AI executive team that it was a dataset \u201cwe know to be pirated\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meta successfully defended a claim for copyright infringement by authors, but the plaintiffs in the case are seeking to amend their claim.<\/p>\n

The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory \u201ccreate their own personal free version of Spotify\u201d. Yoav Zimmerman, a co-founder of Third Chair, said it could also allow tech companies to \u201ctrain on modern music at scale\u201d.<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cThe only thing stopping them is copyright law and the deterrent of enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Copyright has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other. AI tools like chatbot and music generators are trained on vast amounts of data taken from the open web, including copyright-protected work.<\/p>\n

In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner of the copyright-protected work signals they do not want their data to be taken. Almost every respondent to a government consultation<\/a> on the proposal has backed artists\u2019 concerns.<\/p>\n

Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, told parliament this month there was \u201cno clear consensus\u201d on the issue, adding that ministers would \u201ctake the time to get this right\u201d. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by 18 March next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An activist group has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":["post-362221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}