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 ambient noise 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 go toward the UK charity Help Musicians.

Background

Rapid progress in AI technology, constituting an AI boom, was brought to 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.

Content The standard version of Is This What We Want? consists of 12 tracks, each uncredited. The tracks consist of ambient noise recorded in recording studios. The track titles form the sentence "The British Government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies", with the implication that original music will be silenced if AI companies exploit musicians' intellectual property. The album was organised by the British composer Ed Newton-Rex, who had previously worked at Stable Diffusion's parent company, Stability AI, and produced by freelance producer Beni Giles. Giles said that the record was not intended to be silent, but rather to represent "an absence of music and musicians", and to "amplify the visceral sense of lack and draw attention to the environment". He briefed the artists on how they should record the album, telling them to aim for "tumbleweed through a ghost town" rather than "the dead silence of space", and to introduce incidental background noise if necessary, such as an electric fan, amplifier, or outside sound from an open door or window. Giles told the artists to avoid "obvious, intentional sounds" such as talking or playing instruments, or "loud or distracting noises that dominate the space", saying that "we want atmosphere, not static".https://benigiles.substack.com/p/is-this-what-we-want

For the vinyl edition, released in November 2025, Paul McCartney recorded an additional track as the B-side, comprising tape hiss and "indeterminate clattering".

Chart performance Is This What We Want? debuted at number 38 on the UK Albums Downloads Chart.

Track listing A limited edition 12" vinyl album was released and distributed by The state51 Conspiracy. It features a bonus track of an empty studio by Paul McCartney.

Artists 1000 musicians and ensembles are credited as co-writers on the album, including influential popular music artists such as Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Pet Shop Boys, Billy Ocean, The Clash, Ed O'Brien of Radiohead, Dan Smith of Bastille, Jamiroquai, Mystery Jets, Imogen Heap and Yusuf/Cat Stevens; as well as prominent classical music artists such as Hans Zimmer, Max Richter, the King's Singers, the Sixteen, John Rutter, and James MacMillan. For the vinyl edition, released in November 2025, Paul McCartney recorded an additional track as the B-side, comprising tape hiss and "indeterminate clattering".