Spotify has been hacked | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 This is something that popped up from Digital Musicnews dot com. Hackers scrape Spotify's entire library. I thought of this when I saw you know, we were talking earlier a little bit about Spotify and the importance of being on Spotify so that your music is discoverable, the term that we like to use in the industry. But hackers have scraped Spotify's entire library obtain three hundred terabytes worth of audio. Spotify says it has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts. I hope they do a lot more than that.

0:34 Just identifying and disabling those accounts is not going to fix the problem long term. I mean, if they did it once, they can do it again in theory. But it says here hackers say they've scraped Spotify's entire music library, compiling the metadata behind two hundred and fifty six million tracks two hundred and fifty six million tracks tied to over fifteen point four million artists profiles, and intend to make a massive amount of music available to torrent. Meanwhile, Spotify is acknowledged to the breach and confirmed that the culprit's accessed some of the platform's audio files.

1:12 Some of the platforms audio files and quotes. So Spotify acknowledging I mean, you know, fifteen point actually two hundred and fifty six million, that's some of the platform's audio files. I wonder how many actual audio files do you ever wonder about that? Like how much actual music is on Spotify? How many audio files are on Spotify? Because we were talking about I remember a couple of years ago on the show now might have been two or three years ago, we were talking about how Spotify had announced that they were starting to remove some music from its platform because people were uploading you know, demos and really lo fi.

1:54 I don't mean lo fi as in the style of recording. You know, you can you can record low fi music or music that sounds like it's supposed to be, you know, kind of like from another time even right, But I mean actual like low quality, like just poor recording quality music. People were just uploading, you know, stuff that they just just cheap demos that they'd made on their tape recorder or whatever, just uploading all of it to Spotify. And it got to a point where Spotify decided to go through and start and I don't know how they do it.

2:26 I mean, I'm sure they have I'm sure they have the technology to detect these things, but actually went through and started removing some of that stuff. Because you know, if you think about how much music is being uploaded to these platforms like Spotify every single day, every single day, all over the world, people are uploading music, and it's not like you know, I think we tend to think of it as sort of this this infinite thing, like there's just this, you know, because it's because it's audio.

2:58 There's just this infinite amount of space to put all this because it's not they're not physical objects. It's audio files. So you can just put as many audio files up as you want and it doesn't matter how much room it takes up. But it actually does matter how much rooma takes up because you have to keep building, you have to keep building more storage for all this music. It still takes up space digitally, so you can't just let it be a free for all. Part of what made me remember that is because I remember at the time when we talked about it on the show, some people were upset and it was another reason to be mad at Spotify.

3:32 I guess people were upset saying, well, how can they just go through and remove stuff. Well, yeah, it's a little bit. First of all, a little bit of quality control is not a bad thing. You know, if people are just you know, getting the band together and sticking a tape recorder in the middle of the room and then taking that taking that recording and uploading Spotify, you don't necessarily want that on your platform, right, something something like that, you know. And also there's there's abuses that goes on that go on, and you know, people stealing other people's music and uploading it, and there's all kinds of things going on.

4:08 So you know, I'm not saying that you should never be mad at Spotify about anything, but you know, but they have a right to police their own platform too a little bit and make those decisions. Anyway, that was a little bit of a side street, But the point is apparently two hundred and fifty six million tracks, that's only part of how much music is actually on Spotify. So let's see. So there's an update here again. This is from Digitalmusicnews dot Com. An update as of the twenty second It says after this piece was published.

4:50 Well, no, let's go back, We'll go back to the update after let's look at the original article. First. Okay, so, the allegedly responsible hackers, part of a self described nonprofit project called Anna's Archive, themselves, disclosed the data heist in a blog post. In that lengthy post, drawing from the metadata, covers hard stats concerning duration, stream volume, popularity, genre at release date, and more regarding straight audio, Anna's Archive indicated that it had quote archived around eighty six million music files, representing around ninety nine point six percent of listens and clocking in at a little under three hundred terabytes in total size.

5:36 A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. For now, this is a torrents only archive aimed at preservation, but if there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna's archived unquote, the hackers communicated. That's interesting because when they say that it's only again this is from the hackers, When they say that it's aimed at preservation, it sounds like they're they're trying to present this as an altruistic endeavor. We want to make sure that nothing ever happens to this music.

6:18 We want to make sure again, I'm not please, I'm not justifying what they did. Don't misunderstand me. I'm just saying that this sounds like this is what they're presenting. You know, we want to make sure nothing happens to this music, you know, because in theory Spotify can remove anything anytime it wants, or an artists can remove anything anytime it wants, and then where does it go? What if they just delete it and then that's it. It's just gone. It's not available anywhere else, right, So they're trying to preserve all this music.

6:47 That's that's what That's what the hackers have communicated, it says, you're Unsurprisingly, Spotify and especially rights holders, have plenty to say about those plans, as noted by Third Chair where had Yayov Zimmerman Yahov Zimmerman. However, whatever takedowns and illegal actions follow, the damage is already done. Technically. Anna's archive claims that it doesn't host any copyrighted materials, instead purportedly indexing metadata that is already publicly available, direct hosting or not.

7:25 Some of the project's supporters are lamenting the Spotify circumvention and the possibility that will quote ruin the actual important literary archive unquote by encouraging aggressive litigation. Zimmerman wrote, quote the data is circulating on P two P networks, and there is no putting the back, putting this back in Pandora's box. Anyone can now, in theory, create their own personal free version of Spotify All Music up to twenty twenty five with enough storage and a personal media streaming service like Plex.

7:59 The only real barriers are copyright law and fear of enforcement unquote you know, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who this has occurred, to to whom this has occurred, you know what this reminds me of. We're going back. We're going back. Jeez, how many years? Thirty years, maybe twenty five years? Napster. This reminds me of Napster when Napster first became a thing, file sharing, peer to peer, file sharing online, and the whole music industry freaked out because all of a sudden, everything was free online through Napster.

8:40 Now, obviously a lot's changed since then, and the music industry had to figure out ways to adjust to the new reality and the Internet and all of it. But when I see this, anyone can now in theory create their own personal free version of Spotify All Music up to twenty twenty five with enough storage, and a personal media streaming server like PLEX. The only real barriers are copyright law and fear of enforcement.

9:12 Let's see, there's a little do we have time. Oh yeah, we have time. There's a little bit more here. Oh sorry, okay, here we go. Perhaps more pressingly, in the AI age, the massive collection of audio could theoretically be used to train generative generative models and fuel additional unauthorized sound alike outputs, a particularly significant issue if the involved platforms are based in countries with inadequate IP protections. I'm telling you, in some ways, this is napster all over again. This is napster in the AI age.

9:58 It says here. One section of the Anna Archives site says, quote, it is well understood that lms, which is large learning models like you know, CHATCH, GPT and others that suck up all this information. Okay, it is well understood that lms thrive on high quality data. We have the largest collection of books, papers, magazines, et cetera in the world, which are some of the highest quality text sources. Unquote. According to the same site, Anna's archive promptly put out the metadata and with three hundred terabytes worth of audio files, releasing an order of popularity.

10:44 In other words, the full extent of the episode's fallout remains to be seen. And as initially mentioned as Spotify confirmed the unauthorized access, but not where things go from here in a detailed light. In a detailed light statement, Yeah, they didn't really say much. The Spotify spokesperson said, quote, an investigation into unauthorized access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform's audio files. We are actively investigating the incident quote.

11:21 And again, as I pointed out earlier, what is missing from that statement nothing about how we will prevent this from happening again.