The silent album: how 1,000 UK artists turned an empty studio into a campaign

On 25 February 2025, more than 1,000 musicians released an album with no music on it. Is This What We Want? is 12 recordings of empty studios and performance spaces. The campaign says they represent what the UK government's copyright proposals would do to musicians' livelihoods. The credited musicians include Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, Imogen Heap, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Hans Zimmer, Max Richter, The Clash and the Kanneh-Masons, alongside choirs, orchestras, conductors, producers and less famous working musicians. All profits go to the charity Help Musicians.

The Guardian reports that every participant is credited as a co-writer, and that the artist behind each of the 12 tracks is not named, though Bush is understood to have recorded one in her own studio. Read in order, the track titles say: "The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies."

What were they protesting?

The government's Copyright and Artificial Intelligence consultation opened on 17 December 2024 and closed at 11:59pm on 25 February 2025, the album's release day. The consultation document set out four options, from doing nothing to requiring licences in all cases. The one it favoured was option 3: a data-mining exception that lets AI developers train on copyright works unless the rights holder reserves their rights. In practice, that means an opt-out.

The same document admits the weak point. It says the tools for reserving rights "have significant technical limitations and are insufficiently standardised and adopted". So the government was proposing a system whose opt-out mechanism it said didn't yet work properly. Critics, the Guardian notes, called it unfair and unworkable.

Ed Newton-Rex, the composer and former AI executive who came up with the album and runs the certification non-profit Fairly Trained, told the Associated Press that the proposal "would hand the life's work of the country's musicians to AI companies, for free." Bush's own statement was one line, reported by the Guardian: "In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?" The government's response, per the AP, was that it was consulting on an approach that protects both AI developers and rights holders, and that "no decisions have been taken."

Why does the format work?

Most of what musicians can do on a policy question is talk: open letters, consultation responses, a quote in a newspaper. This album did something else. It used the release machinery the industry already runs on, and five design choices stand out.

Silence carries the argument. The empty room is the outcome the artists say they fear, and a listener gets it within seconds. There's an old precedent. NPR later pointed to Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony, in which the players walk off one by one in protest at their working conditions, and to the chorus girls at Sebastian's Cotton Club in Culver City, a venue where Louis Armstrong played, who in 1937 sat down on stage and refused to perform until they got a raise. In both cases the musicians won. As the musicologist Nate Sloan told NPR, taking the sound away makes people notice what it was worth.

The track list is the message. On a streaming service, the most visible text an artist controls is the track list. Turning the titles into one sentence means the slogan shows up wherever the album does: search results, playlists, share cards, a chart listing.

Credits are the petition. Listing more than 1,000 people as co-writers turns a signature list into a credit sheet. The campaign's list puts household names next to choirs, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and hundreds of names most listeners won't know. That mix matters: in our view, working composers and players without a famous name are the ones whose income is most exposed.

The money goes elsewhere. Sending every penny to Help Musicians answers the obvious objection that rich artists are protecting their royalties. It also means every stream does some good whatever happens to the policy.

The timing was coordinated. The album came out on the day the consultation closed, the same day UK newspapers, the Guardian among them, ran "Make It Fair" front pages and 34 creatives, including Ed Sheeran, Stephen Fry and Andrew Lloyd Webber, signed a letter in the Times, the Guardian reports. The AP adds that publishers and creative organisations, the AP itself included, had formed the Creative Rights in AI Coalition. One loud day is harder for a government to ignore than a slow trickle of statements.

Later, according to the campaign, the digital release reached no. 38 in the UK album charts. A record of empty rooms in the top 40 is a number journalists can report and ministers can't wave away as the views of a few lobbyists.

What did it achieve?

The album on its own didn't settle anything, and it was one of many pressures. A brief postscript for readers arriving later: in March 2026 the government's report on copyright and AI said a broad exception with opt-out "is no longer the government's preferred way forward". Of 11,520 consultation responses, 3% backed that option. In November 2025 the campaign announced a vinyl edition at £28 with a silent bonus track from Paul McCartney, again for Help Musicians.

What we think

The smartest thing about Is This What We Want? isn't the silence. It's that the protest is itself a piece of properly credited, properly paid music. Every track has named co-writers, the money goes to a stated beneficiary, and anyone can see who made it and where the proceeds go. That is exactly the standard the artists are asking AI developers to meet: know whose work you used, credit them, and pay. The album models the licensing world it argues for, which makes it hard to dismiss as nostalgia or anti-technology feeling.

It also shows where the balance of power sits. A consultation is built for organisations with policy teams. A working session violinist won't write a 40-page response, but they can lend their name to a credit list, and a fan can press play. By taking the argument onto streaming services and into the charts, the campaign let people take part on the platforms where musicians already have an audience, rather than in a format that suits lobbyists. We'd expect other artist campaigns to borrow that move. The parts worth copying are the clear single message, the credits as signatures, the money sent somewhere neutral, and a release timed to a decision date.

There are limits. Anonymous tracks keep the focus on the collective, but they also mean we can't say how widely the work was shared beyond the famous names. And a stunt this good is hard to repeat: a second silent album would be a novelty, not a statement. The bigger lesson is that the opt-out model's weakness was there in the government's own document, which admitted rights-reservation tools weren't ready. The album turned that technical gap into something a non-specialist could hear.

Sources

• Is This What We Want?, campaign site
• Is This What We Want?, Digital release of Is This What We Want? (1 Mar 2025)
• Is This What We Want?, Vinyl release, with bonus track from Paul McCartney (16 Nov 2025)
• GOV.UK, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence consultation (17 Dec 2024 to 25 Feb 2025)
• GOV.UK, Copyright and AI consultation document
• GOV.UK, Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence (Mar 2026)
• The Guardian, Kate Bush and Damon Albarn among 1,000 artists on silent AI protest album (25 Feb 2025)
• Associated Press, British musicians release a silent album to protest plans to let AI use their work (25 Feb 2025; read via News4JAX syndication)
• NPR, A 'silent' protest? Haydn and a bunch of chorus girls got there first (1 Mar 2025)