On July 14, 2021, the experimental musician Holly Herndon launched Holly+, which she calls a “digital twin”: a tool that lets anyone upload polyphonic audio to her website and receive it back sung in her own voice. Rather than treating voice cloning as a threat to fight, Herndon built a sanctioned, opt-in way for others to perform as her - and a governance structure to handle the money and the rights.
The project, developed with Never Before Heard Sounds and presented in Ars Electronica’s Planet B program, is run through Holly+DAO, a decentralized organization in which holders share governance over how the voice may be used. Revenue from approved works is split, with a portion going to the creator, a portion to the DAO treasury to fund new instruments, and a portion to Herndon. As the project describes it, money flowing into the treasury is “used to create more instruments for people to create work as Holly+, creating a virtuous cycle and economy around her IP.” Herndon frames the whole effort as “Identity Play,” arguing that vocal deepfakes are here to stay and that the better response is to design fair structures for them rather than ban them.
Why business readers should care: Holly+ is an early, concrete template for licensing a personal likeness in the AI era - consent, attribution, and revenue-sharing built in by design - exactly the questions that later erupted in the fake-Drake case and the Hollywood strikes.