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„We can’t let only the people who want to do it for profit or want to do it for their own gain be making the decisions,“ Heap says.
By Ethan Millman
Music Editor
Grammy-winning artist and producer Imogen Heap has officially released a set of AI song generation tools through the AI music platform Jen, Heap and the company announced on Thursday, months after originally announcing their partnership late last year.
Heap dropped five different “stylefilters” on Jen on Thursday, taking her songs “Headlock,” “Goodnight and Go,” “Just For Now,” Last Night of an Empire” and “What Have You Done to Me,” and making them available for users to serve as the basis for new AI song generations.
The stylefilters work by taking text-based prompts users feed into Jen’s system, describing the type of song they want to create. Jen then takes that description and fuses it with whichever Heap song the user picked, creating a new track with the vibe of the selected stylefilter song. Each of Heap’s stylefilters are available for purchase for $4.99 ($7.99 for a higher strength version), allowing users up to 90 minutes of creations that they’re free to use as they please (except to train AI models). The company said they’ll be adding stylefilters for more artists in the coming months but didn’t specify who would participate or when to expect their launches.
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Heap, who’s long been an early adopter of technology to push the boundaries to create her art, tells The Hollywood Reporter she partnered with Jen as she embraced that the technology is here to stay. Heap says she wants to take a more proactive role in deciding how AI engages with her art rather than letting it be decided for her.
“If you’re just looking to ignore AI, well sorry, it’s already happening, and this is not going away,” she says. “We need to find a way to live together [with the technology], and the only way to do that is to do what we do for ourselves. Artists have to get involved. We can’t let only the people who want to do it for profit or want to do it for their own gain be making the decisions.”
Jen first announced the partnership during the Web Summit in Portugal back in November. Jen was cofounded by music-tech executive Shara Senderoff and Mike Caren, the founder of record label and publishing company Artist Partner Group. Every stylefilter is trained only on its original song, according to Jen.
Jen positions itself as an ethical means of AI music development, noting that the company only trains its software on music it’s explicitly obtained licenses to use. This is a departure from other AI companies, who’ve often trained their models without permission from rights holders while arguing AI generation is a fair use case. In the music industry, the major record labels sued two of the most prominent AI music generators, Suno and Udio, accusing the companies of powering their AI on thousands of unlicensed songs.
Senderoff says the upfront payments to artists for their filters offers a potentially faster means of getting paid and says that with stringent requirements to get licenses for their products, Jen has an opportunity to establish a better data and tracking system than what the music industry currently has available.
“I think I’m building in a blue ocean,” Senderoff tells THR. “I don’t think I’m doing what the others are doing. This is an opportunity for music creation to redefine monetization, and that is a big difference because I licensed and did the work. We’re not going to risk the original creators not being compensated because we are building this with utmost integrity and trying to create a precedent for how this should be done.”
Right now, Jen only produces instrumental music, but Senderoff says Jen will eventually launch a vocal product as well.
Heap says she partnered specifically with Jen and Senderoff because “she was the only one doing this ethically, and I did look quite hard.”
“I think a lot of people want to plant their flag in the sand before they’ve got all this figured out,” Heap says. “And maybe that works in the short term, but I don’t think it’ll work in the longer term because f you’re not financially recompensing the people that create music, you’re going to end up with a desert.”
When asked where she draws the line with AI creations, Heap says it’s mainly about proper credit.
“if my music has an essence of something that is being released into the world, it’s just about recognition,” she says. “The only thing I have on this planet right now, this is my output. This is my extension of myself. And I would like that still to be possible. It’s beyond just financials and getting a few extra quid. It’s recognition and attribution.”
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