Gigi Johnson: Today with Jessica Powell from AudioShake on how you can go from a lot of random to an AI and stems company. Jessica, you’ve had quite a journey. You’ve done so many interesting things and I want to ask you about all of them, but can you start out our conversation and tell us a little bit about what AudioShake is and what it’s doing now before we go down the rabbit hole?
Jessica Powell: Sure. AudioShake uses AI to split audio into its different components. For music, that means separating recordings into stems and instrumentals. Stems are the different parts of a song — like the vocal stem or the drum stem. People use stems for all kinds of things: remixing, combining vocals from one track with the melody of another, or creating something entirely new.
Spatial audio on Apple, Tidal, or Amazon uses stems to place sounds in different parts of the perceptual field. On TV or in movies, you might hear only the instrumental because the music editor removed or lowered the vocals so they don’t distract from dialogue.
We also see uses outside of music. Sometimes the original multitrack layers weren’t kept, so AI can recreate them. For example, we recently separated a mono recording of one of my favorite jazz vocalists for an upcoming album. In older formats like Beatles-era tapes, the physical reels degrade, and restoring them can cost $20,000. Even in today’s digital era, stems are often lost, not transferred, or recorded under unusual circumstances — like on a phone. Labels use our tech when they can’t get stems for popular tracks.
Gigi Johnson: And we’ll come back to that issue, because I have about 25 questions just from that. But I’m fascinated because many guests come from a strong tech background and wander into music, or they start as professional musicians and then add tech. You seem to have a different path. What was your joy as a teenager? Music fan? Computer builder? Communications geek?
Jessica Powell: Oh, music was everything when I was a teenager. I was learning to play bass, really into punk, sitting on my bed trying to pick out basslines from CDs — which can be surprisingly hard even when they’re not complicated. Years later, I remembered that when Green Day used AudioShake to recreate stems for a lost master from 1991. They uploaded the track minus the guitar to TikTok so fans could play along like they were in the band. Teenage me would have loved that.
Gigi Johnson: Where did you grow up?
Jessica Powell: Southern California.
Gigi Johnson: So you were aiming to be a punk rock bass player, or was your brain heading somewhere else?
Jessica Powell: Like everyone, I had rock star fantasies, but I wasn’t that good and didn’t have the discipline. I was a distracted teenager — reading, writing, swimming through my freshman year of college, and making thousands of tiny bead mice. I was extremely good at being extremely mediocre at hundreds of things.
Gigi Johnson: [laughs] College beckoned, and looking at your LinkedIn I saw Stanford, Korean scholar, and going to Switzerland to learn French. What was the communications lens pulling you into that?
Jessica Powell: Honestly, I’ve rarely known exactly what I was doing. After Stanford, I wanted to work in journalism. I got an offer from the LA Times but couldn’t afford to take it — minimum wage wouldn’t even cover commuting from my parents’ house. I moved to New York, crashed with friends, and ended up as a market analyst for electricity and oil — not my passion, but interesting and depressing.
I had wanderlust. Growing up around immigrants who spoke other languages made me want to see the world. I saved money, moved to Paris with my then-boyfriend, figuring we’d fail and come back in six months. We didn’t. I stayed abroad for a decade.
Gigi Johnson: And Switzerland, Japan, Portugal…
Jessica Powell: Those were detours, often because that same boyfriend and I kept breaking up. I worked as a translator at a Portuguese NGO, repaired fences to keep out wild boar, taught English in Switzerland, and picked up a random postgrad degree. People say I was “brave” for moving abroad — I was mostly following a boy.
Gigi Johnson: [laughs] But all of that built a unique skillset.
Jessica Powell: Exactly. All that randomness — speaking English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese — landed me a job at CISAC in Paris, the global umbrella for PROs like ASCAP and BMI. They needed someone who could write in English and speak all their working languages. That job wouldn’t have happened without the wild boar farm or chasing a boy around Spain.
Gigi Johnson: And then, Google.
Jessica Powell: After CISAC, I moved to Japan on a linguistic scholarship, then to London when my now-husband started his PhD. I had no work papers, little experience, and applied for everything from waitress to CEO. A friend suggested Google — they liked Stanford grads. I failed the interview, but they were being sued over Google Book Search and needed someone who knew CISAC members. They brought me in as a contractor, and eventually full-time.
Gigi Johnson: That’s heartwarming for 20-somethings who think careers are straight lines. You clearly can handle uncertainty. You also wrote a book.
Jessica Powell: Between Google stints, I joined a startup — a chaotic, toxic place that made me question my sanity. At a conference, I heard founders making grandiose claims, and I started writing to make sense of it all. It became a satirical novel about the tech industry, rejected by every publisher in 2012 because “no one cares about technology.” Years later, after I left Google, Medium bought and published it.
Gigi Johnson: And then AudioShake?
Jessica Powell: I left Google feeling burnt out, wanting to reconnect with music. Talking with Luke, my eventual co-founder, we explored music collaboration tools, then flipped the idea: what if we could split existing tracks? We imagined karaoke for any song, sampling anything, play-along experiences like Green Day’s project, and powering new audio formats. That was the genesis. We spent a long time building the AI model before launching publicly.
Gigi Johnson: How long did it take from idea to something you could actually show people?
Jessica Powell: Quite a while. The early AI models weren’t anywhere near good enough for a professional music context. We had to improve the separation quality dramatically before it could be used for real-world applications. That meant a lot of trial, error, and retraining.
Gigi Johnson: And who were your first customers?
Jessica Powell: Interestingly, our first real traction came from the industry side, not consumers. Labels came to us saying, “We’ve got this song, but no stems — can you help?” That’s when we realized there was a huge B2B market. We started working with major and indie labels, production houses, even film and TV studios.
Gigi Johnson: So you went B2B first.
Jessica Powell: Exactly. We still have a consumer-facing tool, but our main focus is helping rights holders unlock more value from their catalogs. Whether it’s remastering for spatial audio, creating instrumentals for sync, or enabling interactive fan experiences, it all starts with having high-quality stems.
Gigi Johnson: Where does the AI fit into the bigger music ecosystem?
Jessica Powell: AI is often discussed as this looming threat, but in our case, it’s about creating new revenue streams for rights holders and giving fans experiences they couldn’t have before. We don’t generate new works without permission — we work from existing, licensed material. It’s additive, not subtractive.
Gigi Johnson: And personally, what’s been the most fun part of this journey?
Jessica Powell: Honestly, hearing from artists who’ve been able to do something they thought was lost forever. Like restoring that Green Day track — or separating a long-lost jazz performance so it could be re-released. There’s something magical about unlocking music in that way.
Gigi Johnson: What’s next for AudioShake?
Jessica Powell: We’re expanding into non-music audio — film, television, even archival spoken-word recordings. Anywhere there’s a need to isolate or repurpose elements of a recording, we can help.
Gigi Johnson: And for you personally?
Jessica Powell: I still feel like I’m learning every day. And I’ve tried to hold onto the lesson that your path doesn’t have to be linear. Some of my best opportunities came from what seemed like detours at the time.
Gigi Johnson: [laughs] Or from following a boy across continents.
Jessica Powell: Exactly. You never know which wild boar farm moment will end up shaping your career.
