Paul McCartney — one of the most legendary songwriters alive — is now pushing back against the rise of AI-generated music with a protest track that’s basically… silence. And honestly, that’s the point.
At 83, while touring North America, McCartney has released his first new “recording” in years: a nearly silent studio track added to the B-side of a protest LP titled Is This What We Want? The album is a warning shot to the tech giants scraping musicians’ work to train their AI systems without permission or royalties. No melodies. No lyrics. Just hiss, faint clatters, and a slow fade — a metaphor for what happens when AI replaces real artists: the music stops.
The album features artists like Sam Fender, Kate Bush, Hans Zimmer and others who are fed up with the corporate AI push. Their message is simple: if Silicon Valley keeps siphoning off musicians’ creativity to feed the woke algorithm-driven music machine, the next generation of songwriters may never have a chance.
The UK is toying with weakening copyright protections to make it easier for massive AI firms — from OpenAI to Google to Musk’s xAI — to scrape music catalogs at no cost. Meanwhile, the pressure is coming from the other side of the Atlantic too, with the Trump White House urging global governments not to clamp down on AI training data. Musicians see the writing on the wall: tech companies want access to everything, and artists get nothing back.
The protest album spells out its message bluntly through its tracklist: do not legalize mass music theft to benefit AI corporations.
McCartney’s “bonus track” is almost comically simple — just tape hiss, a few footsteps, and a slow fade — but that’s exactly the point. If AI corporations keep absorbing musicians’ life’s work into their datasets for free, the creative world gets quieter, emptier, and eventually silent.
Real music comes from real people.
And if the AI music machine has its way, that sound might not survive.
