Hacker Sentenced After Stealing Unreleased Coldplay Tracks

A hacker has pleaded guilty to stealing unreleased music from artists including Coldplay, Upsahl and Melanie Martinez and selling it online.

Skylar Taylor Dalziel, 22, of Winchester Gardens, Luton, accessed the music by compromising cloud storage accounts linked to the artists, City of London Police said.

She sold the tracks online for a gain of roughly £42,000, police said.

Dalziel pleaded guilty in Luton Crown Court on 4 October of last year to nine copyright offences and four computer misuse offences.

Cloud theft

While spared jail time, she was sentenced by the same court to 21 months imprisonment, suspended for 24 months, as well as 180 hours of unpaid work.

“Today’s sentencing sends a clear message that we have the ability and tools to locate cyber criminals and hold them to account for their actions,” said Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt of the City of London Police.

Fryatt said Dalziel is believed to have been working with people overseas whom the police are working to identify.

The hack came to light in June 2021 when Sony Music Entertainment reported to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) that a cloud account owned by US artist Upsahl had been compromised, finding that a total of 40 unreleased tracks had been stolen and were being sold online.

The IFPI and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) found artists represented by Sony, Warner Music and Universal Music were being sold via an account on an online forum.

The account was linked to Dalziel and the case was passed to London police in June 2022.

Hundreds of thousands of tracks

London police arrested Dalziel at her home in January 2023, seizing three solid-state drives containing some 291,941 music tracks.

A spreadsheet showed Dalziel had sold the tracks to a number of customers, and a review of her PayPal account showed she had received £42,049 from April 2021 to January 2023.

Some of the funds were transferred to multiple bank accounts in the US, with London police working with Homeland Security to identify the account holders.

Richard Partridge, specialist prosecutor of the Crown Prosecution Service, said Dalziel had “selfishly used” the stolen music “to make money for herself by selling it on the dark web”.