Spotify Has Money for AI Wars – But Not for Music Security!

Spotify – They really love calling themselves a tech company and not a music one. Don’t they? AI, innovation, the future and all shiny words while the present reality is this: a pirate activist group called Anna’s Archive claims it scraped massive chunks of Spotify’s catalog, including metadata and audio files, right under their nose.

This unknown group definitely isn’t pretending to be subtle, since they said this was about “preservation,” or about saving music from disappearing. Spotify, in their deefence, says it was just an “unauthorized scraping,” not a breach, and insists no user data was compromised. In other words: don’t panic and just keep paying us.

But let’s be real, when tens of millions of tracks get copied out of a platform that already pays artists pennies, the difference between “hack” and “scrape” starts sounding like lawyer poetry. If someone walks out with the vault, arguing about the lock brand feels cute.

Meanwhile, let’s talk about the irony. The irony in this case is just brutal. Spotify’s CEO is investing heavily in AI defense and military-adjacent tech, yet the platform can’t stop a coordinated data extraction operation. Apparently the future battlefield is secure, but the music server, well, not so much.

Spotify claims the attackers abused trial accounts and automated access, bypassing safeguards over time. That means this wasn’t a smash-and-grab — it was a slow bleed. The kind of failure that doesn’t come from one bad day, but from priorities being elsewhere.

And once again, artists are the ones left holding the short end. Their work gets “preserved” without consent, redistributed without control, while Spotify reassures investors that everything is fine and nothing important was lost.

And don’t you dare blaming this on piracy. What happened here is not about the piracy, it is about a platform that treats music like data, artists like content suppliers, and security like a PR issue. Apparently. When things go wrong, the response is semantics, not accountability.

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In fact, this can be seen as yet another low point in the already shaken reputation and trust that Spotify currently has. And it had many. Just to many, like for example: Treating artists like data and content suppliers while paying them pennies. Investing in AI military technology, promoting ICE, while bands leave the platform and people publish video essays explaining why they’ve chosen to walk away. Pouring in hundreds (if not thousands, cause who the hell knows), of fake AI artist onto their platform and refusing to deal with that….

With this latest incident, the full scope and consequences of which are still unknown,what was once a revolutionary MUSIC service is sinking deeper and deeper into the mud of its own greed and vanity. And who knows, maybe that’s exactly where it belongs.

By the way. here is the list of artists that recently left Spotify, according to Loudwire: