Spotify Investigates Major Data Scraping Incident

Spotify has initiated an investigation following claims from an activist group that it has extracted tens of millions of music files along with hundreds of millions of metadata entries from the streaming service. This group, identified as Anna’s Archive, announced it has collected 86 million audio files and 256 million rows of metadata with the aim of building a long-lasting “preservation archive” of human musical heritage.

The Stockholm-based firm, which caters to over 700 million users globally, has stated that it has detected and disabled the “malicious user accounts” involved in this activity. Spotify has condemned this action as an “illegal scraping” operation that employed unethical methods to bypass digital rights management (DRM) and gain access to the platform’s audio collection. While Spotify boasts over 100 million tracks in its catalog, the company clarified that this breach does not encompass or impact its entire music library.

This incident has raised concerns among copyright advocates, who express unease that the extensive dataset is likely to be exploited by artificial intelligence firms for training model data. Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and a champion for artist rights, pointed out that training on pirated content has regrettably become a prevalent practice in the AI sector. Observers have indicated that such a dataset would enable developers to train music-generating models on contemporary, high-quality audio at an unprecedented scale.

Anna’s Archive, which has previously shared links to pirated literature, stated in a blog post that its goal is to safeguard culture against “natural disasters, wars, and budget constraints.” The group claims that its collection includes 99.6% of all music streamed by Spotify users and plans to distribute the files via torrents.

According to the statement, “Although Spotify does not hold every song in existence, it serves as a remarkable starting point.”