A silent album is not usually designed to make noise. This one is. A group of 1,000 musicians has released “Is This What We Want?” as a protest against planned U.K. copyright changes that would affect how AI companies train their models on creative work found online.
The project turns absence into the message. Instead of songs, the album contains recordings of empty studios and performance spaces, presenting a future the artists fear could follow if creators lose control over how their work is used.
What the U.K. plan would change
The U.K. government is moving ahead with plans intended to attract more AI companies to the region by changing copyright law. Under the proposed approach, developers would be allowed to train AI models on artists’ content found online without permission or payment unless creators proactively “opt out.”
That opt-out structure is the center of the dispute. For artists, the concern is not only that their work could be used without a license. It is also that the burden would shift onto individual creators to prevent use, even when the work may already be spread widely across the internet.
Ed Newton-Rex, who organized the album project, argues that the plan creates a practical problem for artists. According to him, there is no opt-out method in place and no clear way to track which specific material has been fed into an AI system.
That makes the proposed system difficult to navigate. If creators cannot see where their work has gone, they may not know what to challenge, what to protect, or whether an opt-out has any real effect.
Inside the silent album
The album, titled “Is This What We Want?”, includes tracks from Kate Bush, Imogen Heap, Max Richter, and Thomas Hewitt Jones, among others. It also includes co-writing credits from hundreds more, including Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, The Clash, Mystery Jets, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos, and Hans Zimmer.
The album is made up of 12 tracks. Their titles spell out a direct message: “The British government must not legalize music theft to benefit AI companies.”
The recordings are not conventional musical performances. They capture empty creative spaces instead. Hewitt Jones described his own contribution with a detail from the room around him: “You can hear my cats moving around,” he said. “I have two cats in my studio who bother me all day when I’m working.”
The point is deliberately plain. The artists are using silence to show what they believe could happen if copyright protections are weakened for AI training: fewer studios in use, fewer works being made, and fewer creators willing to share what they make online.
A wider campaign against unlicensed AI training
The album is one part of a broader campaign focused on AI training and licensing. Newton-Rex has also started a petition that has now been signed by more than 47,000 writers, visual artists, actors, and others in the creative industries.
Nearly 10,000 of those signatures came in the last five weeks after the U.K. government announced its big AI strategy. That timing shows how quickly the copyright issue has become a rallying point for creative workers.
Newton-Rex said he has also been “running a nonprofit in AI for the last year where we’ve been certifying companies that basically don’t scrape and train on great work without permission.” His position comes after experience on both sides of the debate.
He is classically trained as a composer and later built Jukedeck, an AI-based music composition platform that allowed people to create music rather than use copyrighted works. Jukedeck won the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield competition in 2015 and was eventually acquired by TikTok, where Newton-Rex worked on music services. He later spent several years at other tech companies including Snap and Stability.
That background matters because the protest is not simply anti-technology. The argument from Newton-Rex and the participating artists is about permission, payment, and whether AI development should depend on creative work taken from the open web without licensing.
Why the opt-out model worries artists
The artists’ objections focus on how difficult an opt-out system may be in practice. Newton-Rex said, “We know that opt-out schemes are just not taken up.” He added, “This is just going to give 90% [to] 95% of people’s work to AI companies. That’s without a doubt.”
For creators, the problem is especially sharp because they have long been encouraged to publish and share work online. Newton-Rex put the concern this way: “We’ve been told for decades to share our work online because it’s good for exposure. But now AI companies and, incredibly, governments are turning around and saying, ‘Well, you put that online for free …”
He said some artists have already contacted him to say they are stopping making and sharing their work. That is one of the larger implications of the dispute: if artists believe the internet exposes their work to unlicensed AI training, they may become less willing to publish openly.
Hewitt Jones has also pointed to the possibility of producing work in other markets where he believes there may be better protections, including Switzerland. He previously took part in an in-person protest in which he threw a working keyboard into a harbor in Kent, then fished it out, broken, afterwards.
What happens next
The organizers said the album will be posted widely on music platforms sometime Tuesday. Any donations or proceeds from playing it will go to the charity Help Musicians.
The protest also reflects a wider concern beyond the U.K. Similar protests are underway in other markets, including the U.S. The central question is the same: whether AI companies should be able to train on creative work found online without first securing permission or payment.
For now, “Is This What We Want?” turns that question into a public signal. It asks listeners to pay attention not to what is present on the album, but to what the artists fear could disappear.