The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, The Clash, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, and Yusuf (previously known as Cat Stevens), Billy Ocean, and many other musicians besides, most of them British. The bad news is that it contains no actual music. But the album, titled Is This What We Want?, has been created in hopes of preventing even worse news: the government of the United Kingdom choosing to let artificial-intelligence companies train their models on copyrighted work without a license.

….. Kate Bush has recorded one of the dozen tracks in her studio.” Those tracks, whose titles add up to the phrase “The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies,” aren’t strictly silent: in a manner that might well have pleased John Cage, they contain a variety of ambient noises, from footsteps to humming machinery to passing cars to crying babies to vaguely musical sounds emanating from somewhere in the distance. Whatever its influence on the U.K. government’s deliberations, Is This What We Want? (the title Sounds of Silence having presumably been unavailable) may have pioneered a new genre: protest song without the songs.