Imogen Heap’s ‘Creative Passport’ will change how musicians get paid

Her system is designed to connect otherwise isolated musicians and music-lovers around the world, writes Andy Martin

Imogen Heap speaks about her Mycelia Creative Passport at a web summit in Lisbon, Portugal (Getty)

Imogen Heap just got paid. It’s only fair. She had appeared in front of a sold-out crowd at the Roundhouse in London. She had 200 pins in her hair, her five-year-old daughter was asleep under the dressing table, and for a couple of hours she sang songs about life, love and the River Thames.

And she was wearing MI.MU gloves that enabled her to play audible air guitar (and air drums and control the lights too). She also gets a regular cheque, quite possibly signed JK Rowling, on account of writing the music for the Harry Potter stage play. Which is very nice.

But consider this: what if you play the trumpet for 30 seconds on a track that is played once on Radio Cambodia? What are your chances of getting paid for that? The answer, sadly, is practically zero. It would cost Radio Cambodia HQ more to find out who you are and where you are and send the money to you than the fee amounts to. Imogen Heap, among all her other musical activities, has dedicated herself to ensuring that our impoverished trumpeter finally gets paid through her new Mycelia Creative Passport.

I went to speak to her at her isolated home in Essex. Which sounds like a contradiction. How isolated can you get in Essex? But her splendid “Round House” at the top of the hill in Havering-Atte-Bower is far off the beaten track (one bus a day – I checked) and tucked away in the woods. It’s where Heap goes to compose and contemplate and figure out how to get musicians paid properly.

The house dates back to 1790 and was fixed up by her parents (it only took them nine years). But Heap, now a parent herself, admits that her daughter prefers Hackney. “‘I want to see people!’ she says.” Her Creative Passport system is designed to connect otherwise isolated musicians and music-lovers around the world. If you’re in music you don’t want to be far from the madding crowd.

Heap performing at Bluesfest Music Festival in Byron Bay, Australia (Getty)

We go down to her basement recording studio, festooned with instruments and tech, where she plays me her “Happy Song” (composed for her daughter) on her gorgeous old Steinway. She says that this piano was her “introduction to code”. When she was a kid they used to invite other kids over and tell them there was a ghost called William who liked to play the piano. Then they would trigger the pianola and freak them all out. More recently, Taylor Swift played her guitar here while Heap produced and co-wrote her song “Clean”.

“Unless you’re Taylor Swift,” says Heap, “it’s so important to be able to do many things – if you want to make a living.” The music industry is based on making money, not on supporting musicians. It’s often adjacent companies, interacting with the industry, that pay better (she gives as an example Sennheiser, who commissioned her music for their new headphones; another musician friend reckoned weddings in the Middle East are an earner).

Unless you’re Taylor Swift, it’s so important to be able to do many things – if you want to make a living

“We all have identity anxiety these days,” says Heap. But musicians more than most. It was when she was working out how to release a record she had recorded a few years ago with the minimum of administration and promotion that she came up with the idea of “a database where you can find out everything”.

Most of the typical musician’s time is spent on filling out forms, trying to make sure everyone gets credited, and then chasing the money. There’s no standardised identification. “Twenty-fifty per cent of royalties actually go to the wrong people,” says Heap. “We’re all trying to shout above the noise. That’s why there is so much noise – everyone is struggling just to say hello.”

Creative Passport uses blockchain – originally used for transmitting Bitcoin hither and yon – to facilitate communication between music producers and music consumers. It provides an all-purpose marketplace. If you’re a musician, you won’t need to go about trying to advertise your wares over a myriad different platforms (Spotify, Soundcloud, iTunes etc): you will be automatically out there.

Conversely, if you want to hire someone, you’ll know who’s who. And, if you are due to pay someone, you’re going to know straight away where it’s going. It is, in effect, a peer-to-peer trading system, only more harmonious. It tells you who plays and who pays. The data points or “discovery points” will contain bios, inspirations, skill sets. It hooks everyone up into a system of mutual cooperation. The Creative Passport should become the one-stop-shop portal for music.

The bottom line is, everybody loves music, nobody wants to pay for it. No wonder musicians get depressed

The bottom line is, everybody loves music, nobody wants to pay for it. No wonder musicians get depressed. When Imogen Heap first started floating her bright idea, she received thousands of emails begging her for more. With a grant from the Finnish government, and the magic wand of Harry Potter, she spent four years workshopping her vision around the world and turning it into a reality, almost having to give up music to get the job done.

The “Mycelia” part of Mycelia Creative Passport is the plural of mycelium, meaning an organic network, generally too small to see - like a forest, but at the micro level. “It’s a healthy eco-system,” says Heap, designed to enable the industry to flourish. “And this way we don’t have to spend hours on Instagram. We can be real again.”

The word “creative” next to “passport” is not there just for fun either. It’s not all about getting paid. We are roaming around outside in her garden when Heap says: “If we can get our music maker digital selves organised and open for business, then we have the chance to broaden our opportunities for work and new collaborations. The more unique our talents the better. And that’s the opposite to how the industry is now – it favours what worked before but generally goes against creativity.”

She has an almost utopian vision of “independent self-employed enablers”, but gives a simple, practical example from her own experience. “The Happy Song” was originally commissioned by Cow & Gate: they were looking for a woman who wrote her own music, was a mother and a producer. She ended up working with 30 babies (you can hear some of them on the track). But it could easily not have happened.

Often you miss golden opportunities just because, even though you’re perfect, people can’t find you. With the Creative Passport you get to write the song and the song, in turn, becomes more discoverable. “I want someone to be able to say, ‘Alexa, find me a song to make a baby happy’.”

"The Happy Song" was written for the under-twos, but oddly enough I found that it worked for me too.