Issued earlier this year digitally by Virgin Music Group, a physical edition of the compilation LP Is This What We Want? was released this week. The album is a howl of protest from musicians across the stylistic spectrum—rock, pop, classical, jazz, hip-hop—against government proposals to allow generative-AI companies to feed off copyrighted work without licence or paying the original artists. Over a thousand British musicians have contributed to the LP, and the track titles spell out the first letters of the mantra: “The British Government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies.” The USP of this latest vinyl iteration is a new “bonus” track by Paul McCartney.
This whole album may be a howl of protest, but it’s a silent one. If you want to hear how some of your favourite artists—from Elton John and the Pet Shop Boys to Renaissance choral group The Sixteen and the Ligeti String Quartet—would sound in a studio surrounded by the ambience of the room only, this is your chance. But the point they’re making, now in conjunction with McCartney, is deadly serious—existential, even, if the idea that musicians need space and time to grow their art organically can still fall on sympathetic ears.
This silent intervention speaks with such volume because control over copyright, and compensation for their work, is all the security musicians have, and retaining that control is hardly an unreasonable ask. To underline solidarity between musicians, and to help musicians whose livelihoods might be threatened, proceeds from the release are donated to the charity Help Musicians. This a magnanimous gesture—but no musician wants to live off charity.
The rot might have set in under the previous Conservative administration, but the response of this current government has been characteristically ineffectual and jumbled. Back in 2022—the year of three prime ministers: Johnson, Truss and Sunak—the Intellectual Property Office proposed introducing exemptions that would allow AI companies to mine copyrighted material for text, sound and data, as much and as often as they liked. The proposals from the IPO—“the official UK government body responsible for intellectual property,” its website says—were condemned in the House of Lords as “misguided”, and by McCartney, Elton John and many others, for the financial implications for music, but also because human creativity is to be valued. They were withdrawn.
Fast-forward to earlier this year, and, following a public consultation, the Starmer government put forward the bonkers idea that AI developers would retain their copyright exemption, but copyright holders would be allowed to “opt out”. This shoddy, wholly impractical compromise was predicated on the assumption that AI companies would be entirely transparent about the material and data they were harvesting, then willingly set up a payment scheme to compensate those who had opted in. Let the rats nibbling under your kitchen units choose their own pest control if you want, but that’s probably unwise. Meanwhile, AI refuseniks, those choosing to opt out, would be faced with the thankless, and well-nigh impossible, task of keeping tabs on every usage of their work in every territory around the globe all the time.
The wonder is that AI companies and governments of both stripes—as well as Nick Clegg, formerly on the Meta payroll, who this year suggested that allowing musicians to maintain control over their work “would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight”—arrogantly assume that music is theirs for the taking. Tracing the sorry story of how we’ve ended up here is not hard to do. You begin with the CD being downgraded to something given away for free on the front of magazines and end up with the grotesque chaos of Spotify refusing to compensate musicians proportionally and—as American journalist Liz Pelly testifies in her enraged (and enraging) recent critique of Spotify, Mood Machine—musicians consciously tailoring their output to fit the algorithms of Spotify chill-out playlists; the corporate tail wagging the musician dog.
Let buying Is This What We Want? as a physical slab of vinyl be the ultimate act of defiance. It’s no surprise that the likes of Apple Music and Spotify work so hard to erase the memory of music as physical product. Physical product, once sold to a customer, can no longer be controlled by the Tech Bros. They can’t wedge an advert for ginseng deodorant into the middle of Bach’s Mass in B Minor on CD, nor guide their customers towards conforming to their restrictive playlists. I’ve long felt that streaming was not the same as releasing music in any meaningful sense. Streaming encourages bad listening habits. All the world’s music might be available, but in one ear and out the other, sound reduced to the level of convenience food.
As things stand, the government has kicked the problem into the long grass. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy and the new(ish) technology secretary, Liz Kendall, have established working groups to explore the issues. An AI bill based on the opt-out/opt-in model might appear in parliament next year, but equally might not. And, in the meantime, musicians have been left hanging and are deeply worried.
When John Cage, in 1952, wrote his piece 4’33”, he rehearsed many of these arguments. Often mistakenly called his “silent” piece, 4’33” was in fact an invitation to listen deeply to the environment and accept sounds as they already existed. Whether you needed to call this “music”, or were happy to experience sound as sound, was a personal choice. But Cage was making a point about sound as a universal experience; it’s there for us all.
The unholy alliance between government and AI feels like the death of this Cageian idealism. Music can no longer belong even to the men and women who created it. Really, is this what we want?
