The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, The Clash, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, and Yusuf (previously known as Cat Stevens), Billy Ocean, and many other musicians besides, most of them British. The bad news is that it contains no actual music. But the album, titled Is This What We Want?, has been created in hopes of preventing even worse news: the government of the United Kingdom choosing to let artificial-intelligence companies train their models on copyrighted work without a license.
Such a move, in the words of the project’s leader Ed Newton-Rex, “would hand the life’s work of the country’s musicians to AI companies, for free, letting those companies exploit musicians’ work to outcompete them.” As a composer, he naturally has an interest in these matters, and as a “former AI executive,” he presumably has insider knowledge about them as well.
“The government’s willingness to agree to these copyright changes shows how much our work is undervalued and that there is no protection for one of this country’s most important assets: music,” Kate Bush writes on her own website. “Each track on this album features a deserted recording studio. Doesn’t that silence say it all?”
As the Guardian’s Dan Milmo reports, “it is understood that Kate Bush has recorded one of the dozen tracks in her studio.” Those tracks, whose titles add up to the phrase “The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies,” aren’t strictly silent: in a manner that might well have pleased John Cage, they contain a variety of ambient noises, from footsteps to humming machinery to passing cars to crying babies to vaguely musical sounds emanating from somewhere in the distance. Whatever its influence on the U.K. government’s deliberations, Is This What We Want? (the title Sounds of Silence having presumably been unavailable) may have pioneered a new genre: protest song without the songs.
You can stream Is This What We Want? on Spotify.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
