From Zayn Malik to Mental Health: Record Producer Anthony Hannides Launches Music Wellness App
Can Your Playlist Actually Heal You?
Anthony Hannides has crafted chart-topping hits for artists like Zayn Malik and Rita Ora. Yet a formative encounter at 16 revealed the impact of music beyond commercial success.
At a charity event, a woman in her thirties who had heard his group perform thanked him, through tears, for the lyric ‘I believe in you,’ telling young Hannides that no one had ever said that to her.
This moment stayed with him. ‘As a 16-year-old, I hadn’t really encountered mental health suffering,’ he says.
Years later, Hannides faced insomnia, anxiety, and ADHD, which deepened his understanding. Reflecting on his earlier experience, he shares: ‘When I was writing and listening to music, it brought the highest peace I could find.’ These experiences ultimately planted the seed for a new kind of project—one that would move music from charts to wellness.
With this idea, he’s built Heal—a music wellness app that’s launching soon and is entirely self-funded. Heal uses the music you already love, but in a therapeutic way.
The app uses the ISO principle. This is a music therapy technique that starts by matching music to a person’s current emotional state, then gradually changes the music to help shift the mood toward a desired feeling. “If you’re feeling anxious, it meets you at anxious and can move you to calm,” Hannides explains. “If you feel tired or overwhelmed, it meets you there, and if you want to feel energised or motivated, it takes you there through the music.” It’s an emotional journey built into your own playlists.
Heal pulls songs from Apple Music using its API, which enables different software applications to communicate and share data. The app combines this with biometric data—physical measures like heart rate—from Apple Watch and HealthKit, which is Apple’s platform for collecting health information. It then uses a large language model, a form of artificial intelligence trained to analyse and generate text based on language patterns, to filter your favourite artists and genres into personalised journeys. “We’re using their wearables—Apple Watch and AirPod Pro 3’s HealthKit—Apple Music, the iPhone,” Hannides says. “It felt like it was the best place to prove and validate the model between music and users.”
Central to Heal’s approach is heart rate variability (HRV), a widely accepted marker of autonomic nervous system health. Higher HRV is consistently associated with greater stress resilience, improved longevity, and lower levels of chronic inflammation. Research has also linked higher HRV with healthier aging and increased lifespan, as it reflects the body’s ability to efficiently shift between stress and recovery. Emerging evidence suggests that stronger autonomic regulation may help protect the body from stress-related cellular and DNA damage.
Heal focuses on helping users measurably support this system through intentional music and breathwork. Hannides claims the app can raise your HRV in just 5 minutes. That’s being tested in a study by the Cambridge Institute of Music Therapy Research, which is tracking 100 participants over seven days. It’s a real-world evaluation rather than a controlled trial. “Because of the way we’ve designed the app to fit into your lifestyle, you’re never going to get a controlled environment,” he notes.
Getting here wasn’t straightforward. In 2023, Hannides began developing a cancer-prevention model and building a relationship with Tony Young, head of innovation at the NHS. “He went, ‘Hey, this is great, obviously it’s really difficult, but I really love your energy,’” Hannides recalls. But by late last year, he faced a choice: keep pushing something where others were ahead, or pivot to where he actually had expertise.
Music prevailed. “I could pivot into what I understood deeply, where I could make an impact and had the expertise and real-life experience.”
That transition opened new doors. Anthony was then accepted into the NHS clinical entrepreneur program and has been receiving support since early 2025.
He notes, ‘The program has been great to crystallise the innovation, and the support I’ve received has been invaluable in validating the science.’
Heal is priced at £4.99 a month (annual subscription) and focuses on showing users how their bodies respond to music, tracking results through measurable data rather than just content.
Looking ahead, expansion is planned, starting with Apple Music and followed by Spotify and other platforms. Exclusive content includes wellness tracks produced with breathwork expertise from Heal’s Head of Well-being, Sarah Hannides. ‘We have exclusive programs that blend our music with breathwork and visualisations to further impact HRV.’
The vision for Heal doesn’t stop at digital. Beyond the app, he’s building out the Heal live experience, combining breathwork with deep house and Afro house. ‘It’s bringing the app to life in a community setting where you can have social connections, an important aspect of health and mental wellbeing.’
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Heal’s growth strategy also sets itself apart by avoiding paid influencers in the initial launch period. Instead, he has approached his friendship network of artists and YouTubers to spread the word, but only after they’ve used it themselves.”My whole ethos has been: use it, if it starts to work and you get positive results, you can talk about it,” Hannides says. “ it’s not going to be force-fed.”
B2B is part of the plan. Corporate wellness programs, hospitality, health clubs, wellness hotels. “We’re going direct to consumer, and then we are going B2B2C.
Staying self-funded has been deliberate. “We didn’t want to take funding because we wanted to prove it works,” Hannides explains. “I didn’t want to sell a dream, and it didn’t happen.” It limits how quickly they can scale, but it means the product must work first.
On data privacy, everything’s anonymised. “We collect only the minimum amount of personal information required to tailor the experience—such as music preferences and biometric data like heart rate, if you allow it—and nothing more,” Hannides says. “There’s no diagnosis and no advertising profiles; the only data we use is how you’re using the application and the permissions you’ve granted us.”
He’s using AI in the app’s personalisation engine but producing the exclusive Heal content the old-fashioned way. His take on AI in music creation is pragmatic. “For a young songwriter, and even established artists and producers who are using it as an AI tool, it is a great thing because it helps them understand what to do with their songs.” But there’s a line. “One of the most beautiful things about music is where it’s come from. I’m not sure what happens when you take the human element away completely .”
The five-year vision goes beyond a wellness app. “I want it to be a new way that people will use music intentionally to help and to heal through nervous system regulation ,” Hannides says. “A lot of these AI models may not be human-focused. We’re very much human-focused, human-emotion-focused, and human-health-focused.”
For someone who’s spent decades creating emotional connections through music for millions of listeners, Heal is more personal. It’s that a 16-year-old’s awakening is scaled through technology but rooted in genuine human connection. Whether the Cambridge study validates the HRV claims and whether users will pay £4.99 a month for something they could arguably do themselves with Apple Music playlists remains to be seen.
Hannides doesn’t see Heal as competing with playlists, but redefining how music is experienced. “You can create playlists on Apple or Spotify,” he says, “but with Heal you can build them using a validated emotional mapping method, track your biometric response in real time, and see how your nervous system actually reacts.” For Hannides, Heal turns the music you love into an active health experience, one that makes the emotional and physiological impact of music visible, measurable, and intentional. Hannides adds, “This is a new way to experience the music you love that shows you the benefits to your overall health and wellbeing”.
Hannides is betting his own money that music as therapy is more than just a Spotify playlist.
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I love this concept so much! I will definitely check out the app. Thank you for this ❤️