Paul McCartney‘s first new track in over five years has no melody, no guitar riff and no lyrics; it’s silent.
The former Beatle is joining over 1,000 musicians in the UK protesting their government with a newly released silent album titled Is This What We Want? McCartney, one of the leading voices in British music, joins in on the album on a bonus track to the B-side of the LP. The two-minute 45-second track features hissing and clattering with a slow fadeout.
The album serves as a protest against the government’s complacency in copyright theft by artificial intelligence companies. The tracklist spells out “the British government must not legalize music theft to benefit AI companies.”
The album features a diverse range of UK artists, including Sam Fender, Kate Bush and Hans Zimmer, who are urging the government to prevent technology companies from training AI models on artists’ creative outputs without their approval or compensation. Meanwhile, the British government faces anti-regulation pressure from the US.
Behind the project is composer and campaigner for copyright fairness, Ed Newton-Rex, who told The Guardian, “I am very concerned the government is paying more attention to US tech companies’ interests rather than British creatives’ interests.”
The album follows a proposed change to copyright law in the UK, which would give companies, such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, open access to artists’ data, including text, images and music, for use in training models.
McCartney has long been vocal on the concerns of AI music telling The Guardian in 2024: “We[‘ve] got to be careful about it because it could just take over and we don’t want that to happen, particularly for the young composers and writers [for] who[m] it may be the only way they[‘re] gonna make a career.”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source exclaim.ca ’
