Linda Perry told songwriters to embrace artificial intelligence on Thursday night as she accepted the special international award at the 2026 Ivor Novello Awards in London. The 61-year-old songwriter used her moment at the Grosvenor Hotel to argue that AI is now part of the job, not a threat artists can simply avoid.
Her remarks landed in a room full of the people who make a living from songs, which is why they matter now. Perry, whose writing credits include Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful, Pink’s Get The Party Started and What You Waiting For? for Gwen Stefani, said AI is “just another tool that has shown up to make people’s life easier in some way” and compared its arrival with earlier leaps in technology that were once treated with panic.
“It’s just this is the future, we have to embrace it, because if we try to run from the future, then we’re running from solution,” she said, adding that moving toward AI gives artists a chance to understand it and shape how it is used. Perry also warned that if musicians walk away from it, they are leaving “all the bad guys all alone in the circle figuring out how they can manipulate the whole system with AI.”
James Blunt presented Perry with the award and backed her view that the music industry should not recoil from the technology. He said the business has changed often enough that AI is “just something to embrace,” and joked that it could help if he cannot hit the high notes, sing in his voice, or replace weak backing vocals at a lower cost. His comments sharpened the practical divide around the issue: whether AI is a creative aid, a commercial shortcut or both.
The special international award recognised the impact Perry’s career has had on the British music industry, and it was handed out at a ceremony the Ivors Academy uses to celebrate songwriting and composing. That leaves the central question less about whether AI is arriving in music than how the people who write and record songs will use it responsibly before others define the rules for them.
