Damon Albarn, Annie Lennox, Kate Bush Release Silent Album to Protest Proposed U.K. AI Law

Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, Annie Lennox, Cat Stevens, The Clash and Hans Zimmer are among 1,000 artists featured on a new collaborative album surprise released on Tuesday, but you won’t hear any of their music.

Instead, their new record is merely 47 minutes and 17 seconds of relative silence and white noise, a melancholy display of the sound of music if there’s no artists to actually create it. The album, called Is This What We Want?, is a protest record aimed at the UK government, which is considering changes to the law that would grant artificial intelligence companies permission to use copyrighted works unless artists specifically opt out.

Critics have voiced concern over the opt-out method, with the album’s organizers saying it “reverses the very principles of copyright law.” “Opt-out models are near impossible to enforce, have yet to be proven effective anywhere else in the world, and place enormous burdens on artists, particularly emerging talent,” organizers said Tuesday.

“In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?” Bush said.

Billy Ocean, Ed O’Brien, Jamiroquai, Imogen Heap and Tori Amos are among other artists who participated in the project. The album is made up of 12 tracks whose individual song titles create the message “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft uo Benefit AI Companies.” Any profits the album may generate will go to a charity called Help Musicians.

Is This What We Want? was organized by Ed Newton-Rex, an early AI music developer who now runs Fairly Trained, a non-profit pushing for AI companies to get licenses to train their models on copyrighted content.

“The government’s proposal 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,” Newton-Rex said in a statement. “It is a plan that would not only be disastrous for musicians, but that is totally unnecessary: the UK can be leaders in AI without throwing our world-leading creative industries under the bus. This album shows that, however the government tries to justify it, musicians themselves are united in their thorough condemnation of this ill-thought-through plan.”
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The UK proposal has been expectedly unpopular in the music industry, which has advocated for strict regulations on AI companies to ensure their works could only be used with the express permission of rights holders. The major labels sued two of the most popular AI music generation services — Suno and Udio — last year, claiming the companies infringed thousands of works to train their models without a license. 

British music icons including Paul McCartney and Elton John have spoken out calling for the government to abandon the proposed changes. “We’re the people, you’re the government. You’re supposed to protect us. That’s your job,” McCartney said in an interview in January “So if you’re putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not gonna have them.”

As John also said in a separate interview: “This will dilute and threaten young artists’ earnings even further. The musician community rejects it wholeheartedly.”