# Is This What We Want?

Is This What We Want? is an album by various artists, released on 25 February 2025 through Virgin Music Group. It consists of silence recorded in recording studios, protesting the use of unlicensed copyrighted work to train artificial intelligence. The track titles form the sentence "The British Government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies". Profits from the album will go toward Help Musicians.

## Background

   Sir, The government’s proposal to exempt Silicon Valley from adhering to creative copyright in building its AI platforms would represent a wholesale giveaway of rights and income from the UK’s creative sectors to Big Tech. It would smash a hole in the moral right of creators to present their work as they wish and would undermine our 300-year-old gold-standard copyright system, which supports individual artists and creative businesses, large and small.
   The proposal is wholly unnecessary and counterproductive, jeopardising not only the country’s international position as a beacon of creativity but also the resulting jobs, economic contribution and soft power — and especially harming new and young artists who represent our nation’s future.
   The UK’s robust copyright system is one of the main reasons why rights holders work in Britain, bringing much-needed inward investment. The creative industries contribute £126 billion to the UK economy annually and employ 2.4 million people, 70 per cent of whom live outside London. They drive tourism, contributing to our standing across the globe, and they bring joy and community spirit to our people, while forging a culture in which we are all reflected.
   The government should embrace the Kidron amendments introduced by the House of Lords into the Data (Use and Access) Bill. They are fair and they represent the best interests of the UK and its creative industries without undermining the development of AI. In fact, they harness the power of copyright to drive innovation in the age of AI.
   Britain’s creative industries want to play their part in the AI revolution, as they have with new technologies in the past. But if this is to succeed, they need to do so from a firm intellectual-property base. If not, Britain will lose out on its best growth opportunity.
   There is no moral or economic argument for stealing our copyright. Taking it away will devastate the industry and steal the future of the next generation.
Rapid progress in AI technology, constituting an AI boom, was brought to widespread public attention in the early 2020s by text-to-image models such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, which were able to generate complex images that convincingly resembled human-made artworks. The proliferation of such image generation algorithms coincided with the release of GPT-3 and development of GPT-4, advanced large language models which produce highly convincing text. These transformer-based models designed to create new content from prompts are collectively called generative artificial intelligence, and they require vast sets of training data. This data often consists of text, images, and other media scraped from the web, prompting concerns that the AI products may violate intellectual property rights.
Suno AI and Udio, two AI startups whose products generate music recordings following user-submitted prompts, were sued in 2024 by Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group, who alleged that the companies used copyrighted recordings in their training data without authorization.
In December 2024, the UK government announced a consultation on copyright and AI, outlining a preferred approach that would see the introduction of a data mining copyright exception with a rights reservation package for rights holders. In the months following the announcement of the consultation, a number of prominent musicians warned of the threat it posed to musicians, including Paul McCartney and Elton John.

## Artists

Is This What We Want? consists of 12 tracks, each uncredited. 1,000 artists are credited as co-writers, including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Pet Shop Boys, Billy Ocean, the Clash, Ed O'Brien, Dan Smith, Jamiroquai, Mystery Jets, Hans Zimmer, Imogen Heap, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Max Richter, the King's Singers, the Sixteen, John Rutter, and James MacMillan. The album was organised by the British composer Ed Newton-Rex, who had previously held a position in Stable Diffusion's parent company Stability AI.

## Chart performance

The album debuted at number 38 on the UK Albums Downloads Chart.