What do you get when you put Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, and Damon Albarn into a room? A silent, ambient music protest album, of course. On Tuesday February 25, over 1000 artists banded together in a moving protest against a UK government proposal that would allow AI developers to use copy-righted music from creative professionals to train algorithms and other AI models such as ChatGPT and Open AI - unless right holders choose to opt-out. Just when I thought the UK government couldn’t get more whack, lo and behold, it just did.
The protest album, titled Is This What We Want? is now available to stream on platforms like Spotify and Tidal. It is a 12-song project consisting of ambient sound recordings from inside empty recording studios and other performance spaces, intending to shed light on the possible impact the proposal will have on creative livelihoods and the UK music industry. It’s believed that one of the songs was recorded at Kate Bush’s studio, and she didn’t hold back with providing comment on the matter, asking; “in the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?”.
The icon has spoken.
Make it F(AI)R
Is This What We Want? is just one of the many concerned reactions to the new proposal that has since sparked the wider Make It Fair campaign, acting as a means of protest, raising public awareness, and tackling legalized content theft. Since the inception of the campaign, it has enlisted the support of several more figures within British music including Ed Sheeran, Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien, and Billy Ocean, as well as creative professionals outside of the music industry.
Some of these names include film and stage producer Barbara Broccoli and national treasure Stephen Fry. Fry, like Kate Bush, has expressed his concerns: “You don’t promote growth in a garden by allowing all the pests to feast on the fruit and flowers, and you don’t promote growth in an economy by allowing all the AIs to feast on the fruits of our creators”.
It’s difficult for me to write this, but it feels like we are witnessing a cultural genocide in the UK, where the looters and destroyers of artists' works are not human. They are, however, being aided by humans.
If you care about music protection, you’ll stream it too – and go to live music gigs
Silent albums and I have a bit of a tumultuous relationship (if you’ve listened to Ethel Cain’s most recent LP, you’ll know what I’m talking about), but after streaming Is This What We Want? on Spotify, I’ve found a whole new appreciation for the art of the ambient album. Turns out, they’re not just there to help you fall asleep at night.
It goes without saying that the first thing that jumps out when listening to Is This What We Want? is the album’s hollowness and static-like frequencies that, when put into the context of the government’s proposal, paint a rather harrowing picture of the music industry’s future. Especially if you have a set of the best earbuds or even better a good set of headphones (I use the Sony WH-1000XM5 noise-cancelling headphones), the album does a solid job of bringing the most otherwise-mundane sounds to the surface, be that the soft meow of a studio cat, the slow dragging of a chair across the floor, or the deep sigh of someone sat at a desk in clear disappointment.
One of the better parts of the protest album is that it doubles as a fundraising opportunity, so from wherever you choose to stream Is This What We Want? profits will be donated to the charity Help Musicians, even though Spotify’s reputation for artist royalties speaks for itself. It gives a whole new definition to the saying ‘silence speaks volumes’.
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