A desperate cry from the last real musicians
Paul McCartney, Sam Fender, Kate Bush, Pet Shop Boys and Hans Zimmer have contributed silent tracks to a protest album that exposes an undeniable truth: artificial intelligence is eroding the very foundations of music. The record, titled Is This What We Want?, conveys a clear and alarming message spelled out through its tracklist: the British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies.This is a symbolic yet powerful warning. If AI companies continue exploiting human creativity to train their models without permission, soon there will be no artists left to create real music. What will remain is background noise—just like the two-minute, forty-five-second track from McCartney, made of tape hiss, distant clatter and footsteps. The sound of the emptiness ahead.
The artists’ protest and the betrayal of institutions
Composer and activist Ed Newton-Rex expressed concern that the government is prioritising the interests of US tech companies over British creatives. McCartney has echoed this fear, having long criticised efforts to allow AI developers to use copyrighted content without consent.We are at a breaking point. Elton John, Dua Lipa, Coldplay, Robbie Williams and many others have urged the government to protect human creativity, while political leaders push for policies favouring expanded AI use. Kate Bush captured the essence of the crisis with a haunting question: In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?
The numbers reveal an industry on the brink
By the end of 2024, a study warned that those working in music could lose a quarter of their income within four years due to AI. The generative AI market—valued at €3 billion—was expected to surge to €64 billion by 2028. In 2025, streaming platforms like Deezer saw around 10,000 AI-generated tracks uploaded daily, representing 10 per cent of all new submissions. Even more alarming: 97 per cent of listeners can no longer tell the difference between human-made and AI-made music.The illusion of abundance disguises a collapse of creativity: more content, less art. Spotify, trying to stem the flood, removed 75 million tracks considered spam or imitations—an astonishing figure that reveals how out of control the situation has become.
Against AI-made songs: a deception that empties music of meaning
AI-generated songs are not music; they are simulations of emotion, soulless replicas of something only a human being can create.The industry embraces them because they are cheap, tireless and convenient. But what is lost is immeasurable: vulnerability, imperfection, lived experience—the ingredients that turn sound into art. AI has no past, no memories, no scars. Yet it is already pushing real artists out of the way, cutting into their earnings and eroding their visibility.
If AI becomes the norm, if platforms remain flooded with synthetic content indistinguishable from real music, we are headed toward the extinction of musical authorship. A world full of songs, but without songwriters.
A silent album that speaks louder than any hit
Is This What We Want? is not just a protest—it is an early obituary. The artists chose silence because silence is what remains when creativity is stolen. All profits will go to Help Musicians, but the message reaches far beyond charity: without protection, real human music will disappear.We must act now. We must defend artists’ rights, limit the predatory use of AI and ensure that the future of music is not written by machines without consciousness.
Is this what we want?
