Imogen Heap teams up with new artist-friendly AI platform

Electro-pop artist Imogen Heap has teamed up with AI start-up Jen, which allows fans to borrow the “vibe” of selected songs for their own creations via generative AI.

Heap is the first artist to sign on for the platform’s new feature, which lets users “infuse the vibe, feel, rhythmic style, instrument textures” of fully licensed songs, according to co-founder and CEO Shara Senderoff.

Heap has allowed the platform access to her biggest track, ‘Headlock’, which has almost 300 million listens on Spotify. She has also licensed four more tracks for use as what Jen calls ‘StyleFilters’, namely tunes ‘Goodnight and Go’, ‘Just for Now’, ‘Last Night of an Empire’, and ‘What Have You Done to Me’.

Heap cited the platform’s usage of only licensed music as one of the main reasons she signed up. “The really exciting thing about Jen is it’s the first service I feel fully understands the importance of waiting to get it right,” she said to Rolling Stone. “They’ve gone the really long way around.”

In comparison, leading artificial intelligence music platforms were trained on vast libraries of copyrighted music without explicit permission.

At a time when streaming platforms like Spotify have come under fire for underpaying artists for their work, Jen pays artists 70 per cent of the revenue each time someone uses the StyleFilter. Users pay $4.99 to generate up to 90 minutes of music laced with the vibe of Heap’s songs. They could also pay $7.99 for a “high-strength” setting where song generations will be more explicitly influenced by her work.

Jen’s other co-founder, Mike Caren, frames StyleFilter as an entirely new business venture for musicians. “Think of StyleFilters like an app for music creators,” he stated. “You’re not licensing a song so much as launching a product. You become software.”

Heap seems to be the perfect artist to advocate for the platform as she has worked on her own technology platform, Auracles, for a decade. Auracles serves as a rights management system, allowing her to quickly provide Jen with all the metadata and permissions for her tracks, and she hopes other artists will see its advantages.

Heap hopes this will usher in a new wave of artists jumping aboard the Artificial Intelligence train. “It’s not that I’m just like, ‘Yay, AI,’” Heap said. “I’m ‘Yay, AI’ with people who have ethics and morals that I align with and a future outlook of something that I feel makes sense to me and the planet… I want to build a system that enables as much collaboration, open collaboration, as possible with trust.”