How Imogen Heap pioneered making music in the internet age
When it comes to music, there is ‘BI’ and ‘AI‘. No, not that one, although that is actually a perfect example of it. Those acronyms stand for ‘Before the Internet’ and ‘After the Internet’.
At this point, there’s no real way of saying whether the internet age has been good or bad for music, much in the same way that it’s difficult to say whether the printing press was good for storytelling. From one point of view, it democratised it. From another, it corporatised it. One might think these are all very modern conversations to have, but as Imogen Heap shows, that’s not exactly the case.
People have this idea that discussing the effect the internet has had on music is a very modern thing. Perhaps this is true. Three and a half decades after the internet became something accessible to all, we can discuss the consequences with the benefit of some hindsight, having seen just how unrecognisable the industry has become. However, people have been discussing the possibilities of what the internet could do to music for years.
Now, from the hellscape of 2025, a lot of this sounds adorable. Even looking at the miracle of what Gorillaz created with the internet when Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett first started out, that just would not fly 25 years later. Most of the time, you’re dealing with people talking about the internet while still flush with the mountains of cash the 1990s music scene generated. However, even people talking about the early days of social media, leading to the rise of acts like Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys, feel quaint to the point of naïve today.
However, one artist talks about making music in a way that, even today, feels shockingly relevant. Someone who actually talks about fusing music with the internet in a way that doesn’t feel like pie-in-the-sky wish fulfilment, who understands that the best aspects of both concepts are uniquely similar, in that both are ways of connecting people and also creating. What’s more, this is an artist for whom being this forward-thinking and exciting is absolutely nothing new.
How did Imogen Heap predict the future of music-making?
Imogen Heap is an artist who, unlike most people we would use this word to describe, is actually “underrated”. For the most part, we use that word to describe a concept that cannot possibly be verified, that a band or artist isn’t as celebrated as they deserve to be. For Imogen Heap, the term is more accurately applicable. While she’s had a thriving, decades-long career as an art-pop singer-songwriter, the way she’s underrated is more specific than most.
Heap is underrated as a pioneer in music technology. There’s an argument to be made that only Robyn is a more direct influence on modern pop than Imogen Heap is. That’s not just speculation either, no less an authority on modern pop than Ariana Grande is an absolutely die-hard fan of the Romford native. However, as a 2010 interview with The Guardian proves, it’s not just the sound of modern pop that Heap was talking about decades ago, but the way it’s made as well.
In the interview, she said, “I started blogging while I was making my second solo album, Speak for Yourself, and I realised there are people out there wanting to hear how I’m getting on. And it was interesting having them in the studio, with me, virtually, on my journey.”
She added of the experience, “I so enjoy making a little clip and putting it online and letting people hear it in its demo form. I felt like my fans were with me; they were already on my side. And it pushed me to get a bit more creative with my songwriting, to have fun with it.”
Today, that’s how so much of modern music is made in a very literal sense. This was exactly the kind of attitude that Charli XCX had when she livestreamed the creation of her 2020 album How I’m Feeling Now, ten years after that interview took place, and 15 years after Speak for Yourself was released. The same kind of attitude helped Deadmau5 create ‘The Veldt’. A song that came to be by the man born Joel Zimmerman playing the beat on stream and taking a chance on a vocal line written and dm’d to him by a 17 year old fan.
There is so much wrong with modern music, and a lot of the blame can be put squarely on the internet, or at least how capitalism mutates it, but that’s a different story. However, the more we use it to genuinely connect and genuinely create with people, the more good we can do with it. Trust a great mind like Imogen Heap to have shown us all how to do exactly that 20 years ago.
