In short
Generative AI in music—how artists can shape it ethically, protect human creativity, and ensure attribution/royalties amid deepfakes and voice cloning.
Guest background
Imogen Heap is a multi-Grammy singer, songwriter, producer, engineer, and technologist with 20+ years in music. She developed AI Mojin (a voice model trained on hundreds of hours of her singing) and is building Oracles, an IP/attribution system for artists. She also created gesture-based Mimu gloves (used by Ariana Grande) and released the independent album Speak for Yourself (20th anniversary discussed).
Key claims
AI “can’t go back in the bottle,” but humans must create an ID/verification “data layer” so people can prove authorship. AI works need identification granularity; detection tools are unreliable. Labels already sign music that sounds AI-like, and early “imperfect” AI outputs may be creatively valuable. Major labels may have clauses that allow AI training, so artists should negotiate/opt out.
Notable examples
Zania Monet (poetry + Suno; signed by Hallwood Media); Imogen’s singles “I Am” and “Afterlife” using AI Mojin; Rob Thomas/RDJDJ experiment; Runtime song; her daughter’s voice at the end of “I Am”; voice used by artists like Bareretta and Lucy Hayes; Mimu gloves on Ariana Grande.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Impact of AI in Music
0:46 to 1:18
Discussion on how AI is transforming the music industry and artist's creativity.
“Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free.”
The Impact of AI in Music
1:25 to 7:30
Discussion on how AI is transforming the music industry and artist's creativity.
“When AI becomes the next pop star, who gets the spotlight?”
Navigating AI in Music Creation
7:31 to 12:39
Exploration of the balance between AI-generated and human-made music.
“So, yeah, there's just, it's right now it involves lots of steps to just kind of clear the area to make me, enable me to just actually put something down.”
Identifying AI vs Human Music
12:40 to 14:01
Conversation on the challenges of distinguishing between AI and human music.
“Yeah, that's something that I've been encountering in my own reporting is people will come to me and they'll say, hey, this song is AI generated.”
Navigating the Gray Area of AI in Music
14:01 to 18:09
Explore the complexities of distinguishing between AI-generated and human-created music.
“in that because right now it's one of those, it's almost like a guessing game and you'd hate to accuse someone of using AI or say an AI work is human and have that be completely wrong.”
The Role of AI Mojin in Creative Expression
18:10 to 24:22
Learn about Imogen Heap's AI persona and its impact on her music and identity.
“But I do want to go back to that point about Hallwood signing AI artists.”
The Future of AI in the Music Industry
24:23 to 28:00
Discuss the implications of AI's integration in music and the artist's control over their work.
“I wanted to, you know, show people that we already don't know.”
Exploring AI in Music Creation
28:00 to 30:02
Imogen Heap discusses how artists can integrate AI into their workflow.
“I'm wondering, how are you seeing some of your peers use AI in their musical process that inspire you?”
The Impact of AI on Music and Discovery
30:21 to 34:51
Heap reflects on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in music.
“This summer, serve up the cookout classics.”
The Legacy of Speak for Yourself
34:51 to 39:12
Heap celebrates her album's anniversary and discusses its enduring relevance.
“And now it's just really showing the problem.”
Show all 20 chapters
Challenges of Independence in the Music Industry
39:12 to 42:06
Heap shares her experiences transitioning from a major label to independence.
Transition to Independence
42:06 to 43:38
Imogen Heap discusses her transition from a major label to independence.
“And they didn't give us any airtime at all or any support.”
Challenges with Major Labels
43:38 to 45:26
Heap shares her frustrations with major labels and their handling of artists.
“And I only just, you know, Fru Fru was released 25 years ago, I think.”
Concerns Over AI and Music Rights
45:26 to 47:49
Heap expresses her concerns about AI companies using artists' music without consent.
“And I think I might message that somewhere on an open letter.”
Mimu Gloves Development
47:49 to 49:28
Heap discusses the development and challenges of her Mimu gloves for music creation.
“managed to get them on the shelf um they're not you know they're very very good quality the best in the world for creating music.”
Rapid-Fire Questions Introduction
49:28 to 50:25
Heap prepares for rapid-fire questions about her influences and inspirations.
“And I'm just out in the garden making music with whatever I want to make it with.”
Inspirations and Collaborations
50:25 to 51:49
Heap shares her thoughts on collaborations with other artists like Ariana Grande.
“Just a couple words per answer and we'll see how it goes.”
Legacy and Music Evolution
51:49 to 54:44
Heap discusses the legacy of her song 'Hide and Seek' and its cultural impact.
Playlist Recommendations
54:44 to 56:00
Heap shares her current favorite songs and throwback recommendations.
“And that's why I really want to develop the live system with the Mimu Gloves, with generative AI of Mojen, but under an acceptable level of AI generative work.”
Exploring Favorite Music and Guilty Pleasures
56:00 to 58:36
Imogen Heap shares her favorite songs, guilty pleasures, and influences in music.
“When I was like 17 in Camden, when I was, you know, starting out, there was this band called Acacia.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the Bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either gonna be okay. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other. FX is the Bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+.
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1:18Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. When AI becomes the next pop star, who gets the spotlight? The artist or the algorithm? You might have caught recent headlines about so-called AI artists or artists that heavily rely on AI tools like image, voice or music models to make their songs. There's one artist, Zania Monet, for example, who recently signed a record deal and is climbing the gospel charts and is playing on radio stations across the country. Meanwhile, last week, a bunch of songs in the top 10 on the country sales chart were also songs that stem from this kind of AI artist.
1:56At a time when AI-generated songs seemed to be exploding, cropping up everywhere from TikTok trends to the Billboard charts, it felt like the perfect time to dive into how this will impact artists and what can be done to protect human creativity in the process. And I couldn't dream of a better guest to join me here today to discuss this topic than Imogen Heap.
2:21Welcome back to On The Record, a music business podcast from Billboard and Sickford Productions. As always, I'm your host, Kristen Robinson, and I'm thrilled to have Imogen Heap on the show today to talk about the rise of generative AI and how it will impact artists. Imogen is a multi-Grammy winning singer, songwriter, producer, engineer, and technologist who has been making music for over two decades now. And it's clear that she still is somehow a few steps ahead of the rest of us. we will unpack this growing AI phenomenon and what these tools mean for the future of creativity. As Imogen herself recently put it, the genie can't go back in the bottle.
2:57And after years of research and development, she's finding ways to use AI ethically within her own artistic practice. There are really few artists that understand the intersection of music and technology quite like Imogen. Her latest singles, I Am and Afterlife, for example, both use her regular singing voice and this AI voice model, which is trained on hundreds of hours of her own singing, which she calls AI Mojin. She's also been hard at work developing oracles, a system designed to help artists manage their IP in an age of AI where deepfakes and training models on music without permission is very commonplace.
3:31We'll also touch on the 20th anniversary of Imogen's influential album, Speak for Yourself, which she released at another time of great change in the music biz. Back then, CD sales were down, MP3s were taking over, and almost no one was having an easy go of it. But still, Imogen managed to release the project independently and to great success. Today, the album is considered a modern pop classic, and ever since, she's gone on to serve as an inspiration for music's biggest stars, including Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Olivia Rodrigo, Pink Pantheress, and yes, even Jason Derulo, in the years since Speak for Yourself's release.
4:09All this to say, I am very, very excited for our conversation today. So let's go ahead and bring her in. Imogen Heap, thank you so much for coming to On The Record. I'm so happy that you're here virtually from London. Thank you. Very happy to be here. Where did you just fly in from? You were just on a plane like two hours ago. I was coming from Lisbon, a lovely city. It was actually torrential rain. I didn't know if I was going to get back here because the thunder and lightning last night was so incredible. I thought that there was somebody like going over my hotel room with a massive car or a big train or something, but it just turned out to be thunder.
4:40um so yeah we might have but we've stuck a long way forever which is why i'm late there's nothing worse than trying to get back quickly from the airport so i really appreciate you still being able to make it um i'm really excited to chat because i think that you are one of the artists that really just has been keeping your finger on the pulse of what's going on in the world of like cutting edge technology generative ai all that stuff and so that's one of the things that i report on at billboard it's become a huge focus for me over time so but before we get into that kind of a chat um I wanted to kind of throw it back to the beginning of your career when you're getting started what were some of the technological tools in your studio back in the day that really inspired you well I didn't have a studio in the beginning because it was very expensive to have studio um but I I did have a keyboard I had an it's an N-Sonic TS12 which I still love um and I did have access to computers so when I was 12 I started learning on uh an old Atari and they had some software on there at school that nobody knew how to use and uh it was in like this cupboard it was like it's basically like the naughty cupboard um but I I realized data in life that my head the music teacher was just kind of being nice to me he's going just getting the cut but he knew that I just wanted to like make music on the computer so that's that's when I started realizing that oh wow there's something in this computer thing that's like helping me be more than I can with just writing it down on the paper and hoping that an orchestra might play it one day which they never would um well they did eventually haha um so yeah it was like computers and then when I was 15 I went to the Brit school I was a second year in it's like this school in the UK which lots of musicians go to because it's the only one of the only schools like it um and that's when I learned to use Cubase um so I did know my way around studio but I didn't have that much equipment I had a QI70 uh but that was a bit later that was like when I was 21 so I could make little beats on that do you think that like technology has always inspired you to start writing or what do you think usually kickstarts the songwriting process for you it really is more about time like what am I doing any musical instrument anywhere or if there's any time where it's like oh actually I could be doing music now then it really doesn't matter where I am I can make music out of anything and I think it is really about just feeling calm and excited and like there's not a lot on your back right now and that the sense that you actually might have time to finish something or even just manage to do a verse or even if you did capture something I'll I have to support this fun little, it's called the drone machine and it's made by stylophone.
7:22And I love it. And I spent four hours just like noodling around on it on the plane the other day. But I didn't have a way to record it into my iPhone. So, and I didn't bring my laptop. So, yeah, there's just, it's right now it involves lots of steps to just kind of clear the area to make me, enable me to just actually put something down. But most of the time it's a notepad. I just write all the time in my little notepads. or in my notes because when I was younger it was a piano um it was a piano or it was a cassette player um and I would just come up with something but now life is different very hectic there's so much stuff going on there's little peace so it's just little scraps of things really here and there um and like this little stylophone thing's really cool interesting so I want to get to AI Mojin oracles and the Mimu gloves but before I get there I am very curious like when was the first time that you realized that generative AI was going to be very impactful in music um I don't know I think it like weirdly crept up on me the first time I did any generative anything was with a human called Rob Thomas and this was about 15 17 years ago and he wrote code for apps and he had there was this brilliant app basically would take the world around you and it would synthesize it in harmony so if you're on the train it would kind of have resonant frequencies of everything and then it would just sound all in time and in tuned um RJDJ that's what it's called and there was all these different scenes and they were really great anyway I loved it so much I reached chasm and was like can I speak to somebody there and then he came around and we did this experiment where he would he would personally analyze the way that I improvised and then he created a little program so they could generate music um in the style of the way that I played piano so he was just like you know mentally um creating a little algorithm as a human as kind of a portioning kind of procreating what he thought was me um and it just kind of occurred to me wow that'd be so useful to be able to just like start improvising and then the piano continues on without me and then I can kind of jam kind of with myself but like a one step removed but it's still kind of me and so I always was I was really inspired by that and that started a song called Runtime because we were going to make a running app out of it that would like work to the rhythm of your of your running and everything and I think that that's a total thing now um but we wanted to we wanted to explore with so it was yeah about 17 years ago but I suppose the way that I feel now it's impacting is just everybody's terrified that's not true not everyone's terrified I'm not terrified I'm just aware that even not just even music everything everything uh is is being turned upside down and it's not all a loss uh there are many things that we can do to mitigate it and to set the standard to to make things better for us in the future by getting things right now and I'm excited about the aggression I do see it as a kind of evolution of us as people and I'm excited to with all the possibilities that could happen I don't know if I go on and talk about that for about four hours but I felt like only really everywhere else I felt the big change in the last two years really but I've been doing like AI judging of AI music competitions for about I don't know.
10:52I've been asked to do that like three or four times over the last 10 years. And there was a sudden like jerk basically of like, oh, wow, this sounds completely amazing compared to what it is then. And, you know, that is incredible. You know, the shift that really happened over a year, basically. I feel like for me, when I noticed a huge shift was I started reporting on AI music and it was just like they could generate kind of a shitty but passable instrumental. But then when Suno came out and you could really generate everything at the click of a button and it sounded pretty convincing. And increasingly, it's gotten even more and more convincing.
11:30That's when I really felt like, oh, wow, it's suddenly here. It felt like just a moment when things really did shift. And it's interesting that we're talking this week because it feels like right now a lot of these so-called like AI artists, which I don't know how I feel about that term. But there's a lot of people who are using AI tools very heavily in their creative process that are now actually seeing some level of success from it. Because I think at first it was maybe a creative experimentation, but they weren't rising up the charts or they weren't trending on TikTok or getting a lot of streams.
12:07But now we're starting to see that with like Zania Monet. She has made a lot of headlines recently. I'm wondering for you as these kind of heavily AI generated projects start entering the marketplace alongside human made works. Do you think that these things should be treated similarly in terms of what royalties they make, what opportunities they have? Or do you think there needs to be some distinction between AI works and human made works? And all the gray in between. Yeah. Yeah. And then all the gray in between. yeah for sure and i do think we need to have a way to identify in some form however little or granulated that can be right now um but we definitely need to build the the layer that allows the humans to show their input and to be verified by other humans as that is that person's work and because you know i trust this person who trusts this person and that's what we're doing which we might talk about later with oracles um it's just a place for a human to say this is me these are my works and these are the people that i work with these are all this is all the contextual information around this this piece of music and how i made it and the instruments and whatever it is whatever we want to find out um and creating this wealth of information that the the future and now industry can build on so until that happens we are still kind of floating around in midair because we don't even have the bedrock of understanding, even right now, as we're still in this kind of traditional music making way, of identifying human work even now.
13:41And that's one of the main problems. Yeah, that's something that I've been encountering in my own reporting is people will come to me and they'll say, hey, this song is AI generated. And I'm like, I don't know for sure that it is AI generated or if it is fully human made. And I think AI detection tools still have a long way to go. And I'm really, really hopeful that there's some strides made in that because right now it's one of those, it's almost like a guessing game and you'd hate to accuse someone of using AI or say an AI work is human and have that be completely wrong. But like you were saying before, there's like such a gray area in the middle.
14:18When we talk about or we see headlines about AI songs or AI artists, this can be anything from something that is fully generated just using a prompt and then the human steps back or it could be something where it's mostly human made but there's just an ai vocal that's incorporated kristen actually i just want to butt in because you said then about mistaking uh human music for ai music and actually embarrassingly i did that the other day and i felt really bad about it so i discovered this artist um when i was listening to a playlist and i discovered this playlist because of my new favorite artist called Blauen which I know I'm a bit late in the day but I just love this record that he's done so it recommended you know go listen to this other stuff so I found this long playlist I listened to loads of stuff I was like oh quite like made a load of notes on this plane journey but one of them was that this artist called Data Cluster and I was like wow this really sounds like Max Cooper and John Hopkins like it really really does like I I was really suspicious um And I looked up on the biography about this person and it just said music made with errors or something like that.
15:26And I was like, this is very suspicious. And then I looked this person up and I did actually find a person behind it. But I thought, ah, but that could be a ruse. It might not be real. Anyway, I found that Instagram page and then I followed them. And this person was like, oh, my God. Hey, is this real? Are you real? I love your music. And I was like, are you real? Yeah, I was going to say like both of you are. Because I just said this record that you've done, I absolutely love it. Like I'm really, really enjoying it. But I can't help feeling how similar it is sometimes to Max Cooper and my friend John.
15:58And he was like, oh, thanks so much. They're my biggest heroes. That's like the best thing you could have ever said to me. And I was like, no, and I don't take this the wrong way. But did you create a model that kind of, you know, mashes them up together and then generates them and kind of did stuff over the top? He was like, absolutely no way. I can show you the stems. I can do this. and fair enough he got like you know a bit offended um but it has got to that point where we can recreate things and honor people and uh and we do all the time it's sometimes without knowing it we just we go oh we've come up this idea and actually it was something that somebody else did but you just forgot about it and you thought it was an original idea um and it happens all the time so i'm quite yeah i we definitely are that place where it's very confusing right now and we do need some clarity but we are we can do it there are there are tools and everybody wants it so I feel like the silver lining really of this dark cloud as some might see it as AI music taking over um is that we are going to get the data layer of works we're going to get this complete data layer of works because people will want to prove not only that they're human but they want to go they want to actually just say you know I'm human and these are all of my works that I actually contributed to even if I'm a mixing engineer or whatever it is so I feel like you know this panic in uh you know how are we gonna how are we gonna um know what's what is also going to empower us to just do what we've needed to do for like 100 years I recently spoke to someone at Hallwood Media which is signing AI artists they've signed this Zania Monet um artist which has gone pretty viral in recent weeks.
17:37And one of the things that they said is because Zania is backed by a real person who essentially writes poetry and then uses Suno to help complete that poetry into a song, they record or they have her record herself making her music so that if anyone ever has questions about it, they can actually show like, here's exactly what she did. Here's exactly what AI did. I could kind of see that being something that becomes a thing in the coming years of just trying to create a log of here's what I did. Here's what I did is that increasingly becomes part of the creative process. But I do want to go back to that point about Hallwood signing AI artists.
18:17They're the first label that has been pretty public about doing this. I'm wondering, in the coming few years, do you anticipate that this will become a thing where major record labels are signing AI talent or talent that heavily uses AI? And how do you feel about that? Do you think that that's right? I think lots of things when he said that. I feel like a lot of major labels are signing music that sounds AI generated to me anyway. It's just like, oh, that just sounds like that last thing and that last thing. Nothing's changed. So it doesn't surprise me at all that that would happen. And wherever there's money, obviously they'll go if they think they can make money out of this artist.
19:01I think right now it's exciting. It's like it's such a nascent space, exciting kind of beginnings where it still sounds a bit AI and it's like you're not quite sure. That will soon disappear where you absolutely can't tell. I actually love these early beginnings where the voices just sound like they're jumping around or the performance of the voice isn't quite right. And the diction, the way they say things and the accents is all funny. I really like that. I'm kind of going to miss that. When AI and humans create music that we never could have expected, you know, that just like really we just wouldn't have gone there.
19:37Because you couldn't really imagine mashing that thing with that thing because it would have taken so long to do it with a band, with a fit. I don't know um that we'll just be able to iterate and hear things differently and it will just it will it will really just like make us hyper creative so I'm excited for the music that's going to come and the people that are going to mash and hack hack these systems together to create like weird kind of weird sculptures with small heads and but music um because why not like we're not really we're not really pushing the boat out a lot um and I really think we need to and I I think we'll go through this boring phase of people just mimicking what we do.
20:16And then once we got over that, we will create music that's really astounding and exciting. But it will be a complete cross between us. What you just said earlier really reminded me of a quote from Brian Eno, who I'm going to butcher it. I don't know it off the top of my head. But he talked about how after a technology gets really good, people start to have a fondness for whatever the quality of it that everyone criticized. when it first came out. I mean, early photography and film did not look good. There was a grain on it. It didn't look totally real to life. But after a while now, we're adding film grain onto things to make it kind of emulate that style.
20:56I think it'll be interesting to see what people think of like looking back on, I guess, like 2021 AI generated images where like the hands are all messed up and they have different fingers that are not right. But yeah, it'll be fascinating. but I wanted to go back to something that you've referenced before you said um that even like you know 15 years ago you were working with AI to try to create an algorithm that mimicked the way that your creative process worked and now I was using a human I was using a human to do it using a human to do it okay yeah yeah but it was the beginnings of this generative idea that you can extend yourself beyond just your human capacity yeah you can create a code that will emulate you and beyond Yes.
21:40And so now, like you've recently released a 13 minute song called I Am, which also has a beautiful visual that goes along with it. And in that song, it's not just you singing. It's also AI Mojin, which is your essentially digital self or your AI self. So can you tell me about what AI Mojin is and why you think that that is an interesting creative interplay to essentially collaborate with yourself? Well, I don't think the way that I've used A.M. Edge in this song is particularly creative. It's kind of a very long-winded, kind of silly way around of doing things. But I did it as a statement. And I did it to rile people up, I suppose, and just be able to have this conversation.
22:22Because the song, in the beginning, it takes you through this journey, really, of what I've experienced over the last four years. I recognised, I was starting to think about, who am I? What am I? what you know this ego what is it what's stressing me out like what is it when you get rid of all of that in just in breath or in silence or in the noise what's there and then I started to think about AI because um what is what is that that that AI isn't um what can what can I feel that is something that an AI can't feel and I kind of got down to these like bits these tiny bits and so the noise section in that song is like the annihilation of my ego.
23:08I'm not saying I haven't got an ego. So then I needed aftercare after that. I love this idea that AI is our child. AI is something that we are raising together as the mother and father, as the adults raising this child. And what a mess we're doing of that. And, and right at the end, there's this, there's the AI voice of Mojin. I wanted it to be an AI voice, even though I had to sing everything. And so I sang all the parts and then I put it through my AI model, so that it's the model of my voice that's then singing the words rather than my actual voice that I sang. But the melody of it and all the, you know, inflections and all of that is me.
23:53But the sound, it's like changing the sound on a, on a keyboard. Yeah, so it's like putting a filter on top of it in a way. So you still had to do the act of singing. Yeah, I had to do singing, but it's like changing out the sound for another sound. So it could have been a trumpet. And I wanted to trick people, you know, into going after all of this music, after all of this, like, quite traumatic noise section, that they would feel something. And that voice would not be my voice. It would be A.I. Ogin's voice. I wanted to create the discussion. I wanted to, you know, show people that we already don't know.
24:27but does it matter you know um I mean I say in the in the title it's AI Mojan um but it was all ethically sourced it's all done in the best way possible and it's my own voice and I didn't use any I didn't generate any music of course everybody has already uh some people have already cancelled me for you know even talking or saying that AI is in my music so many of them are I can't believe Imogen I'm never listening to music again you used AI to generate this song I was like no I did not I wish that I could have done it because it took me four years to do it with a hundred thousands of hours. Anyway, so my point is that everybody is fearful of it, but we can still feel, you know.
25:08And what is art, you know, art is something to someone but not to somebody else. But if essentially it speaks to you and it makes you feel something, does it matter? If it makes you recognize something in yourself. I mean, essentially all AI is generated from human work. And I think that what we'll end up with over time is the AI models that we do rely and live with will teach us that we don't need anything else. We don't need this capitalist, horrible world that we have got to the extreme of. We just need each other to be kind to each other for community, to care about, you know, we don't need happiness out there.
25:51It's not something we can buy, a Porsche, it's not going to make us happy. Um, you know, so the voice right at the end of the song is actually my daughter's voice. And she's the she has the last word. And that is to say that, you know, AMOgen, Scout, AI, they're our children. And we need to take care of them. And we need to do a good job of showing them how to do things the way that we would like them to be done, not how we're currently doing a lot of things. That's so fascinating. I mean, I love that you've been able to make this model with AI Mojin that is totally within your control. So you can do with it what you like.
26:30I think the thing that gets scary is when, you know, anyone can manipulate or find anyone's voice model online or train a voice model based on interviews that people have done in the past and just run with it. I'm wondering, in an age of AI, I wonder how artists will continue to self-curate. I think such an important part of being an artist is having the taste and the curation to know what you want to say. What songs you want to put out, what songs you want to keep for yourself, what interviews you want to do, what things you don't want to do. In an age of AI, it feels like you're losing a lot of control over yourself.
27:08Do you have fears around that? I mean, we already have lost control. People misquote us constantly, you know, say that we've written something when we haven't. Don't credit us when we have been a part of it. that's still very much there so I do actually think this is going to really it's just going to it's going to force us into creating something that will make sense of what we have already for and for the future so that we can put a flag in the sand as humans and go okay up to this point um it was human generated and then there was like this blurry space and then we figured it out and now you can really discover what is what um I I'm excited because I like I have you other people have also used my voice um there's an artist called barretta who's uh created a great dance track with it and there is um an artist called lucy hayes done a really amazing song with it too and you can go to uh i have a profile on the dsps as ai.mojin and you can see the songs that she her voice has sung on including my voice uh including my song um but the nice thing about that is as i say you have control uh again i think it just comes down to this like core missing piece that we don't have, which is an ID layer, like identifying home for each individual that I think we'll just have in time anyway, just as much as there's one physical version of you in the world, even though we'd like there to be more of us.
28:26And there's one of me, but there's no digital one version of me somewhere that I own, that I can, that anyone in the world can go to, to find de facto information about me, you know, up to the minute if they need to, so that I can express whatever I want to express in like a kind of umbilical core to anything that I might be connected to in one instant from one place. I want to be able to do that. I'm wondering, how are you seeing some of your peers use AI in their musical process that inspire you? Is there anything interesting you've seen recently? I'm not seeing any of my peers doing any music with AI.
29:03Maybe I've got, I don't know, I just feel like all my friends, they're just like we just make music the way we always play music um I'm really interested in developing Rogaine to the point where I can jam on stage with her where she can train off my music and she can continue like say if I because I really do want to do this like I don't want to slave away in front of the computer and make tracks like I am for the rest of my life I don't want to do that like I really don't want to do that I would love to find ways to speed up the process but not take away any of the creativity and there are many things you do in the studio or to prepare plugins or you know that you can clean up and you can help ai could help you do some of that admin or help you identify things that could be similar sounding that you could pull in without having to go through all the presets i mean there are already things that do that i mean splice i'm pretty sure i started to do that i'd say that very few artists i mean I know that, is it Timberland that's like a lot on Suno?
30:02Yes, yeah. And he's like very, you know, advocating. That's the sound of zero sugar, 200 milligrams of caffeine, and the power to burn body fat. Storm, energy for life. Storm Energy Blend helps boost metabolism, which in combination with exercise and a healthy diet helps burn fat. This product alone does not produce weight loss. Individual results may vary.
30:25This summer, serve up the cookout classics. Heinz ketchup and Kraft singles. Every good burger needs a layer of perfectly melty cheese and thick rich ketchup. We all know it's not a cookout without Heinz and Kraft. And I understand it. It's fun. It's like, it's super fun. And it is hard not to go there. I had a play. You know, I have had a play. And I was like, well, hold on a minute. That's actually really cool. Like I actually might use that. But you have to stop yourself because I do have, I do want to create standards that allow for musicians to be recognised for the work that they've done, that these streaming service, these AI models have learnt from and hoovered up, but are not in any way caring at the moment, seemingly, about how to solve that problem.
31:15And I really want to spend my time helping to solve that problem, helping to contribute to, you know, attribution for musicians of the past and the now so that they see themselves in these feature models if they want to and if they don't, fine. One of the things that I've heard from AI companies before is that they foresee a time when pretty much everyone makes music. One person even said to me once that, you know, back in the day, we could have never foreseen that people would go from, you know, if you wanted to get your family photographed, you'd have to go to a photographer who's a professional and had the camera sit down with them at a special place.
31:54But now we just take photos on our iPhone. and this person was saying that they foresee a time when everyone just gets to make music it's not something reserved for musicians anymore I guess great what's wrong with that yeah yeah I'm wondering what your thoughts are on like the the barrier to entry lowering so that everyone could feasibly do it I really why not so if you've spent many like 10 ,000 hours whatever perfecting your craft you always have an edge um you know whether you're if you generate anything off these you know services right now you're just going to sound like 99.9999 % of other things that do that too but if you have an edge if you have a real something there that connects with people and you use it differently and you go a little bit further out of your way and you create something that's genuinely astoundingly good then that's great that's really good that helps everyone move forward I don't have a problem with that at all like I said everyone takes way to ask everyone's top where we can all put filters on it and clean it up and the other thing is like why should music just be reserved for those who you know have an emphasis to like computers and programming and lessons if you need it and you know all time and whatever money I don't know but I mean because initially um we all used to sing but we sang before we spoke um we we had songs that we would sing and we would dance and we could move our bodies and we felt that was just the way we expressed ourselves and now we're just scared to sing um so I think this is great you know if it helps us connect with our creative inner selves um and allows us to feel more at peace with ourselves because there's something that's you know really connecting because it feels great to make music um then I am definitely for it 100 % I've got no issues with it uh if anything it's just gonna what needs to happen which will happen in tandem with it is much better discovery tools to help people see through and hear through the noise because it is ever so much harder to find the good stuff out there as there are many many many uh issues well there's that you don't really know if you're listening to ai generative music at the moment on on these platforms i have come across hundreds of uh generative versions of headlock um and other songs that i've done that are definitely not human uh or largely not human creators as they come up quickly um and you look at the profiles and you try and find out and there's it all kind of disappears and it's all like one label and nobody really knows and then they disappear and you know it's just like oh was it there at all um so there's definitely like weird stuff going on already and who knows who's benefiting from that, you know, the top level, who knows.
34:45So it is just a mess. And I think it's good because it has been a mess forever. And now it's just really showing the problem. One of the interesting things that I've been thinking about in terms of AI music is it certainly speeds up the process. So we're going to get more music, especially I think we're going to see more music ending up on streaming services. Right now, we already have 100 ,000 songs being added every day. You know, if we put AI aside and we look at a few years ago when it was still a similar number of just a mass amount of music coming into the services every single day, a lot of that music is from totally DIY artists.
35:20I think the revolution of DIY brought forth a ton of music. But, you know, for the most part, most people aren't listening to most of it. Some of it's not very well done, and that's okay. You know, they've released it. It's a passion project, whatever. but you know algorithms allow us to navigate through the hundred thousand songs that are there on Spotify every day and so as AI comes in I think it'll just accelerate that process we'll definitely have even more songs but this is not a new problem we already have a lot of songs to sort through so it just has to get smarter and better. I think what we're going to be able to wrap into it is the story of the song so right now the algorithms are like pitch and tempo and timbre and like maybe lyrics or dynamic range or that kind of stuff that it's creating algorithms for us to go oh you might like this um but you might want different ways to search you might discover that you like you know a particular producer you know and if you're lucky you might i don't think you can search via producer at the moment on streaming services but you can search obviously through artists but you can't you've just about started to be able to search through composer um but you still have to be registered in a certain way not everyone's allowed to be a songwriter composer i've only i'm just allowed to be one even after how many 30 years i've been doing it um so there's it's not even at the basic stuff isn't isn't sorted you can't search through drummer or um you know mixing engineer um but you might discover if you could that uh you actually actually the reason why you love these songs is because of the arranger or is because of the particular way somebody plays a string instrument that kind of inspires the rest of a song for someone.
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37:08Yeah, yeah. And to kind of pivot the conversation a little bit, you just recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of Speak for Yourself, which is very exciting. And I mean, it's really crazy how many times these songs keep coming back up. I really enjoyed Normal People and the sync placement that a hide and seek had in there a couple of years ago. I've been on TikTok and I keep finding your work there as well. I'm wondering why do you think this has continued to find new audiences organically over time? I don't know. Maybe there's the nostalgia. Maybe there's something comforting in it. I don't know.
37:48I asked myself the same question. I feel very lucky. I think, I don't know, maybe it's just a generation of people that 20 years ago, you know were just starting out they were students or whatever and at that point for them it meant something because they heard it in the oc or whatever however they discovered it um and people like ariana grande they discovered it then and taylor that they all kind of discovered it then and now 20 years later you know they're massively famous pop styles and um they're just killing it all around the world um and they're introducing people as well um and the people that were watching those programs back then they're in cool jobs and doing different things and you know so they they chuck it in because it means something to them and I'm finding that not just in the music space in the like in the fan space but in a much smaller way also see it in the industry side I see the people that were my peers when I was younger in the industry we're also coming together going do you know what we're gonna we're doing things differently now and I'm finding I'm finding it much easier to navigate and to help shape the future of this industry because it's a different year groups coming through basically the old guard are going out and we are able to come together I'm like nearly 50 now I've already said and and it just it just feels like it's easier and then it'll feel easier again for the next generation hopefully as they learn from our mistakes and see that there's no point to be rigid and there's no point to be possessive over things nothing fun comes from that just more pain yeah yeah earlier you were touching on um like the music industry and things turning over um and one of the things i find really interesting about speak for yourself is that it was first released i didn't realize this until very recently that it was released independently um which was probably not a very easy thing to do back then it's now become so much more popular to be an independent artist and to find success that way I'm wondering looking back on it um how do you think it compares being an independent artist now versus when you released that album 20 years ago um I feel like I was in a sweet spot because it was just as the industry was going um digital and streaming and there was iTunes had come out just literally a month or two before Speak for Yourself happened and there was only one front window there was like now there's like 50 revolving windows and god knows and i got lucky and i got chosen my album got chosen to be the album of the week on itunes and i was like how did this happen you know i'm a nobody i'm like i i just couldn't believe it that you i thought you'd have to pay for that spot but i did release the record myself it was independent and i ingested it myself i still have an account for the apple even though i shouldn't um and because i was one of the first and so I sent a message to the to iTunes uh like info at iTunes or whatever and I was like hello uh just a message to say thank you to whoever put my song my album on the front page I think it was maybe the UK iTunes and I was like thank you so much we don't know how much this means to me and I got a message back from this guy um called Denzel Fiegelson um and he's he was the boss at the time uh and he was like do you know what no one's ever thanked us would you like let's come into the offices.
41:13And I was like, yes, I will. So I went into the offices. I met Pete Downton, who was like one of the first digital streaming, gave the music to digital streaming companies like Spotify before they had their own way to do that. And I went to there, I was the first artist in the office. So I have this, like, I was at a lucky point where there wasn't that much going on. You were either with a label or you weren't. And I reached this point where people were like, wow, an actual artist is coming in to the office. first this is weird it's not a music executive and it really worked in my favor um and it was much less scary to do independent than to go again with a major label it was just it just tore me apart every time they just made a terrible job of of not promoting it or promoting it a good job of not creating it yeah because frou-frou was on a major label right and that's then you were dropped after that and you went independent my first album was called i make a phone my second album was Fru Fru with Guy and then Fru Fru they decided they didn't want to make another Fru Fru record and I was like fun um they're like but we'd like to make an image in Heat record and I was like no thank you um you literally you couldn't have made a bigger mess of such a great record like we absolutely thought the details is one of the best things ever it was so bad um and now just so many other people think that but at the time they were like no no didn't get onto Radio 1 it's It's not going to be as big as Sugar Babes.
42:39And they didn't give us any airtime at all or any support. And they made us try and come up with some hits and put on the record. It was just so, so much fun. Oh, my gosh. So in the end, I was like, can you please just let me go? Because I just can't. I just don't want to do this. I don't want to do it. And I think they thought, fine, off you go then. And I just said, I'll give you first refusal, which I didn't. But they didn't care anyway. They were just probably happy to get rid of me. and then it was just so much easier I basically remortgaged my flat I took a hundred grand out because it had grown in value over it's this small flat in Waterloo over a year and it was the only way I could get any money I did try the banks but didn't want to get any money so I remortgaged my flat and then I bought all the studio equipment and I did it for a year and then I could have gone with a major label then but I was like I'm gonna do it myself like I'm going to bring all the people that I've met from all the labels and all the times and I'm going to bring in my best crew and we're going to do it together.
43:37I'm going to pay them and I'm still going to earn way more than I would have ever done if I'd signed to a record label. And I only just, you know, Fru Fru was released 25 years ago, I think. And I've only just seen royalties from the album. Wow. Only just. We've only just recouped. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. Wow. That is hard to believe. I mean, also that Fru Fru record is incredible. And to think that it wasn't enough at the time for this label is hard to believe. It's one that I really enjoy listening to to this day. And I know a lot of other people keep, you know, finding it again. I mean, the streaming numbers are crazy.
44:17I think it's always interesting to look at a streaming service in an album that was released before streaming and see how it does. because some of them just don't fare that well and that's okay. But to have an album that is still being streamed that much from what, 25 years ago or so is really remarkable. But it's amazing now in 2025 how many artists are waiting to sign longer. They're getting better deals because they have the ability to be independent. I'm curious, like if you think you were coming up now, do you think you would have also still chosen that independent path? Oh, 100%. yeah I'd really do not don't sign a major label deal like basically everyone who signs a major label deal after about a year they're like how do I get out of this deal how long have I got how many more albums do I have to do before I get out of this deal every artist knows that it's a stepping stone to becoming independent it's not it's not the place to end up you know it's just you've got to make the best deal that you possibly can um they're always going to give you the worst deal uh even if you think it might be good because of the way they've read it um and also you don't know what they're doing especially in terms of ai training giving over licenses to what you we don't know what they're doing we don't know um it's not in our it wasn't in our i mean i'm not signed to sony anymore thank goodness but um they at the time i was i was actually like two years ago when they still had licenses of my stuff i was writing letters i was like do not in any event give my music to AI companies, do not, do not, do not do this.
45:53Otherwise I'll take you to court. And I think I might message that somewhere on an open letter. I can't remember. I didn't really get any replies at all. It was very suspiciously quiet. But I did hear that backroom deals were being done at major labels with AI companies and that they were doing discussions. And I don't know what they've done, but I'm glad to not be in it anymore. Yeah. I mean, I do think it's very interesting about record contracts is you sign it and they usually have some sort of a clause that leaves the door open for technology in the future that can't be foreseen at this moment, which I understand why they do it, but it does leave instances like this.
46:34I mean, who could have foreseen generative AI in this form? And that's something that I think about a lot with legacy artists are artists who are deceased. I've reported on some estates offering the voice rights of a person who's been passed away for like 10, 20 years to AI companies. And I always wonder, like, if they could have even foreseen that generative AI would be a thing, how would they feel about this use? And unfortunately, we'll never know. But yeah, I think, yeah, it's tricky, isn't it? uh I guess they're dead I don't care um but yeah if it's the family then they'd probably just be like yeah sure of course I'm dead do what you like yeah and that that would be my that would be my stance one more thing I wanted to ask you before we start wrapping it up I I wanted to ask you about the gloves the Mimu gloves I absolutely love those um they're something that Ariana Grande has used on stage quite a lot they're really wonderful to see in um everyone's different hands I guess um are you still iterating on that and improving it or do you feel like the product is done as is no we're still we're still iterating um we have we have a batch that's going to be delivered hopefully before the end of the year uh to like a few hundred people um we haven't yet managed to get them on the shelf um they're not you know they're very very good quality the best in the world for creating music.
48:01And they're expensive. They're like two and a half grand a pair. So, you know, it's like buying a computer. But they're expensive because they're basically like tiny team. We're doing our best to make them, you know, as best we can, as cheaply as we can. But we're not like a mass, you know, we're not making millions of these things. So it is still expensive. And a lot of people, that's obviously a big barrier. and it's a leap to go to, you know, make music gesturally, even though it feels totally natural when you do it. So we are missing out on the people who the impulse buys because it's like, oh, I want to do that.
48:38I'm going to buy that. Yeah. And then they hit buy and then they're going to get it next day and then they're going to love it. But then it's like, oh, wait a minute, I'm not going to get it three months or maybe six months because there's takes on that. And then they don't buy it. Yeah, our problem really is that we need to have enough capital in advance to buy them, to get them on the shelf. and then I think we'll see a lot more people buying them because you can't get credit for something if it doesn't exist. So once we can create a way that's on the shelf, then people can pay over time, over a couple of years or whatever.
49:07It's much more easy to stomach. But we're a tiny company. We haven't taken investment other than friends and other musicians' tiny bits because we just want to do it our way. So we're hopeful that we can find a way to get it on the shelf because I do think we haven't seen the end of it yet really even though it's been really hard we didn't have a big chat the other day but there's nothing else like them you know I know you can do it with the computer therapy you've seen videos of people using touch design or whatever and just kind of you know using the IR the camera and creating gestures and doing it in front of your computer we know you can do that you can do that with us too with the clever software but there's nothing like being away from the computer being in the garden and making music with the trees.
49:54I've got a wireless microphone. I've got my in-ear headset. And I'm just out in the garden making music with whatever I want to make it with. Or I can go into the studio or I can go by the piano or on stage. And it's just that freedom of being able to conjure music in real time in real whatever space and not be in front of the camera. This has been such an interesting discussion. I'm going to end it off with some quick rapid-fire questions and then we'll do our playlist. I might not get rapid fire answers, but I'll do my next question. Okay, okay. Just a couple words per answer and we'll see how it goes.
50:29Okay. Not myself. Who is an artist that you view as an innovator? Team Exile. Okay. A song from Speak for Yourself that you look back on with great pride? Hide and Seek. Yeah. The coolest way that someone has paid homage to your work? I don't know. I really liked hearing like Kazoo version of Hide and Seek. I love that I mean no Ariana Grande when she did Goodnight Ngo and she like I love it I love that she did that I went on tour and I did my version of her version of my song and no I really like the way she did that she's so generous she really just has continuously shared the love and always supported me and she's just like enormous she just has such integrity all the things she's been through I think she's so talented I really I know I'm going to work we are going to actually do something together one day one day we both said it it's just we've got to find the right thing at the right time so that we can really enjoy it and it's not just something like look it's got to be but you know at the same time it's like you don't want to build it up so much and then we never do it because it's like it's going to be the perfect time but I really really want to work with Ariana I think she's fucking great yeah she is what's the best film TV use of your song hide and seek i mean obviously the oc um because that was the first one but um i think the the most intriguing one was the saturday night live skit um because they didn't ask permission um they just they just did it and quite a lot of people had seen the oc but way more people saw that skit and then well didn't even know where it came you know did know where it came from i suppose but didn't didn't know about the song it was like too many steps removed at that point and this was one it was one it ended up being one of the first memes uh on the internet uh people just doing what to say and just all different like simpsons version all all different versions of it um and i don't think it was an official simpsons version but people just you know edit stuff up um and it was amazing it was amazing to see but that was before monetization sadly on youtube so there were like billions and billions of uh bits of this song but i think it like goes under the radar of monetization because it's not quite 30 seconds but otherwise it'd be like i'll be like totally million it and yeah that really is too bad that it was just a little early on the youtube thing but um i think that song still has a lot of legs online there are still people using it all the time um who is an artist who counts well actually you kind of answered this maybe ariana um let me ask me the question um an artist who counts you as an inspiration that you enjoy listening to yourself well yeah ariana um i don't know i mean i heard like i really heard this person's music recently called blaren not ban sorry a data cluster um and he was like totally excited so and i really like his music well i discover lots of people that i'm like wow i love this person's music and then i think like there's no way they're going to know me because i'm just not cool enough and then like no i really actually like that i'm like their guilty pleasure um which i find a little be like how can I be a guilty pleasure I went not cool enough um but I'm very lucky I I seem to find fans in all kinds of like unexpected places like you know extreme heavy metal rock bands or noise artists or hip-hop or clav rap or you know just you know just it's just it's mad how cross-genre the music gets I really love that I feel so lucky really to have yeah know people from all over and just feel like it's a possibility really hopefully to work with anyone if I really want to do it maybe I couldn't I don't know but there's so many people I want to work with I just I don't want to sit in front of the computer and write music in the way that I have done over the last 30 years just like solitary mixing and just moving bits of audio around I have to find another way And I know there obviously are other ways, like you can do modular, you can work with a band, but I've just become a slave of my own technique, really.
54:44And that's why I really want to develop the live system with the Mimu Gloves, with generative AI of Mojen, but under an acceptable level of AI generative work. so that I can conjure lyrics in real time with my own brain in real time. But also maybe with the temperature or how many people in the room changes the way that the melody moves around or how fast the chords move depending on how close the album you are. I just, I want to create music in real time in a very different way than I ever have. And that's really what I'll spend my time on. Exciting. Well, okay, so the final thing of our interview is the playlist part.
55:23So we always ask everyone on the record to help make me a playlist. What is a song you can no longer gatekeep? We'll just start there. What's a song that you're loving right now that you want more people to know about? I really do love this album by Blauen called Sick Elixir. Sick Elixir, I nearly had a car crash because I was driving and I've been waiting to hear it in the car. So I could hear it not just on my headphones or wherever. I wanted to hear it like loud. and so I played it and I had a car journey enough time and oh my god I just couldn't believe how good it was it just I was like I was swearing I was like if somebody looked in the car they would be like what the hell is that one doing I was like going oh my heaven god this is heaven amazing I was just like I couldn't believe how good it was I was just laughing just I was like being possessed so the whole album is absolutely amazing but I can't really choose one because I liked all of them but I don't know I like it there's one called Dot, dot, dot, NOS.
56:21What is a favourite throwback of yours? So a song over 10 years old. When I was like 17 in Camden, when I was, you know, starting out, there was this band called Acacia. And one half of it was Guy Sigsworth, who obviously we turned into being Foo-Foo. But the album that they made, Acacia, is so good. And I think that one of the tracks that I love the most was called Maddening Shroud. so I'd check that out it's from the 90s so long ago I'll have to check that one out and last but not least what is a guilty pleasure for you um well I just it feels a bit weird to say it because it's not really like a guilty pleasure but it kind of is and I talked about this person earlier this this uh artist called data cluster and I found them on uh you know on this random playlist and I was I was my I was a little bit thinking that they might have been AI generative between some artists that I love so the guilty feeling is like but I love Max Cooper and I love John Hopkins and they're like my I like know them um and there's such echoes of their music in this that I feel slightly uncomfortable about because it is so to the T uh but the melodies and it's not it's not their music at all it's just data cluster um absolutely idolizes these artists and has studied them meticulously to the point where he just knows how to get those sounds i just would not have the patience to do that and i'm just like oh fuck it i'm just gonna make a sound like this um so i guess my guilty pleasure in a way is that because i would like to talk to john and and max and see how they feel maybe they're like that doesn't sound anything like me why would you think that sounds like me i'm like oh sorry huh um so the one that i found on this playlist i'm going to try and find the name of it circa 13 it's had under a thousand plays on spotify um and he's got 899 monthly listeners but I was like this is just great and I really liked it and I was listening to it a lot and I got in touch with him I think he lives in LA might meet up with him when I go to NAMM in January um but yeah Data Cluster and the track that I heard was called Circa 13 but it comes off his debut album um I believe which is called Coalescence Awesome.
58:36Okay, I'll check it out. It's really nice. Well, thank you so much, Imogen Heap, for coming to the show. This has been so much fun. I love talking AI with you, and you'll have to come back soon. Thank you. Thank you, my pleasure. All right, another big thank you to Imogen Heap for coming on the show today and sharing her insights with us. It's really good to get a pulse on how an artist is feeling about AI right now, especially one who is still very hopeful about the future. Up next, we're going to be diving into our Charts Roundup, where we'll highlight this week's biggest movers and shakers.
59:05Here is the top 10 of the Hot 100 chart for the week of November 22nd.
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1:00:12Number 9 is I Got Better by Morgan Wallen. Number 8 is Folded by Kehlani. Number 7 this week is Mutt by Leon Thomas. Six this week is Daisies by Justin Bieber. Opalite by Taylor Swift comes in at number five. Man I Need by Olivia Dean rises to number four. Number three again this week is Ordinary by Alex Warren. Golden by Huntrix comes in at number two again this week. And finally, the number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the week of November 22nd, for its sixth week at number one, is The Fate of Ophelia by Taylor Swift. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of On the Record.
1:01:11And another special thank you to my guest, Imogen Heap, for coming on the show. And if you liked today's show, please consider hitting us with a rating, a follow, a thumbs up. All those things really help a show like ours to grow and to reach new people. Again, I'm your host, Kristen Robinson, and tune in next week for another peek behind the curtain of the music business. I'll see you then.
From the publisher
AI is reshaping the music industry, and Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and producer Imogen Heap breaks down what this moment really means for creators. She joins host Kristin Robinson to unpack how she’s blended technology with artistry for two decades, the rise of generative AI and why it’s becoming harder to tell where human creativity ends and machine production begins. Heap explains the urgent need for better metadata, identity layers and contributor search tools, and what it will take to set the right standards before AI becomes fully embedded in the music industry. She discusses the possibility of labels signing AI artists, the fears and misconceptions surrounding AI-generated work and why she believes art still matters if it resonates, no matter how it’s made. Heap also reflects on building her career independently, the flaws in traditional major label deals, and the innovations behind her Mi.Mu gloves as she envisions the future of human-driven music in an AI-powered era.
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