1,000 musicians, one silent album.

On 25 February 2025 a collective of more than 1,000 musicians released Is This What We Want?, a near-silent album of empty-studio and rehearsal-room recordings. The track titles, read in sequence, spell out: "The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies."

The signatories included Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Imogen Heap, Tori Amos, Cat Stevens, Hans Zimmer, Pet Shop Boys, and Paul McCartney. The album was organised by the British composer Ed Newton-Rex, who had previously worked at the company that became Stability AI and who resigned over the same copyright question.

It was released in protest of a UK government consultation that proposed allowing AI developers to train on copyrighted material unless rightsholders explicitly opted out. The album debuted at number 38 on the UK Albums Downloads Chart.

The point of the silent record was the absence. The room tone, the empty studios, the rehearsal halls without players. This is what the catalogue will sound like, the album argued, if the consultation passes and the music is treated as training data instead of work.

The industry rarely speaks in one voice. When it does, the floor is being drawn. The question the silent album was forcing was not technical. It was: who is allowed to make music, and on what terms.

DeepTune's position is upstream of that question. We do not host AI-generated music. Every release passes through a person before it goes live. The provenance is the work.