Album Review: Is This What We Want?

If you haven’t heard the album, Is This What We Want?, you’re not alone. You may even wonder if you’ve made a mistake the moment you press play. The opening track is silent, leaving you to frantically check your speakers, convinced something’s gone wrong. There’s no pithy guitar riff, no grounding beat, nothing to hold on to. Just as you consider that your computer isn’t working, you will realise that the next eleven tracks follow the same pattern of silence.

Is This What We Want? is a silent album that was anonymously released on 25 February, having been “co-written” by more than 1,000 musicians, including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, and Annie Lennox. The album protests the UK government’s proposed copyright laws which would allow AI access to copyrighted music for its enhancement. The message is pretty straightforward: “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies,” as spelled out by the album’s twelve track titles.

While advertised as an entirely “silent” performance, the album is not a complete absence of sound. The twelve tracks are recordings of empty studios and performance spaces, featuring the occasional hum of unmanned equipment, disgruntled groans of overworked machinery, or creak of a door left ajar. It is the haunting sound of abandonment, of what could become of the music industry. Where the greats once stood to record their most famous albums, a tumbleweed is heard making its way through the halls of Abbey Road Studios.

The album is not just an art project, it is a warning shot fired across the bow of the music industry. The UK government, in its push to become a global leader in AI, seems willing to put the future of its cultural and economic heritage on the line for this gamble in new technology. In 2023, the music industry contributed a record £7.6 billion to the UK economy. The introduction of AI-generated music as a replacement for real musicians threatens damage to both sectors in Britain. Crowds will stop gathering for live shows when the chart-topping stars are nothing more than bots programmed to steal the tunes of old legends. The vibrant community that once revolved around music will be hollowed out, leaving a chamber of artificial echoes.

But it is the album’s title, Is This What We Want?, that really lingers and demands our attention. Do we want to hand over our intellectual property? Do we want to watch idly as AI files through the cultural bedrock of humanity and appropriates it without so much as a ‘thank you’? Or, perhaps more cynically, do we want to shrug our shoulders and let the government push full steam ahead while musicians get discarded and forgotten? If the government cannot be swayed, then it is the music itself we have control over. In releasing this album, the musicians have made clear that, if the machines are going to take over, there will be nothing for them to work with.

Of course, the government’s hesitation is not at the hands of some great moral qualms on the legitimacy of AI, but because of the legislation’s economic impact. However, we are left with this peculiar album that gives birth to dialogue through its silence. We are forced to confront that a very different future of music, or its end as we know it, may be just around the corner. If we fail to act in defiance, it will be too late to ask, is this what we want? 

Image from Wikimedia Commons