Tech

1,000 Musicians Dropped a Silent Album to Protest AI Theft

The chillest protest album in history drives home the point that without artists, a music landscape driven by AI will be a desolate wasteland devoid of people.

By Matt Jancer

March 3, 2025, 5:50pm

Ronnie James Dio would never allow this. (Andriy Onufriyenko via Getty Images)

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We’ve reached a silly state in society. At no point in our history have we had such devices to enable ’round-the-clock, instantaneous access to all forms of information and entertainment. Yet, at the same time, the industries that drive the evolution and adoption of this hardware have hollowed out the creative industries that create the content we view on these devices.

More than 1,000 British artists—”a mix of artists that everyone’s heard of and many musicians who are not household names,” Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and AI developer, told the Associated Press—have released a protest album to Spotify and Tidal titled, “Is This What We Want?”

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What’s the point of a 4K television or a virtually endless choice of music streaming if our obsession with loads of free, garbage content or our chickenshit reliance on AI turns all the films and music into bland trash? It’s like having the biggest glass when there isn’t any beer.

why they chose silence

Each of the album’s 12 tracks consists of ambient noise from otherwise silent recording studios and performance spaces. No talking, no instrument playing, and definitely no singing during the album’s 47 minutes and 17 seconds.

It’s meant to protest the British government’s plan to possibly allow tech firms to use copyrighted songs to help train AI models, with an opt-out model that’d require artists to take action if they don’t want to be included.

My favorite? The last track, titled Companies (All 12 tracks spell out “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft to Benefit AI Companies”). It sounds like a kitten purring—a metal kitten purring. I could totally work to this.

Profits earned from streaming will be donated to the musicians’ charity, Help Musicians. Want to listen to it? Check it out on Spotify or Tidal. Then get pissed. Then get vocal.

Large corporations are often like paper tigers, seemingly unconcerned about the mice in front of them until the mice make a lot of noise. Then, as they imagine their dollar signs floating away, they fold faster than Superman on laundry day.