Hardware Ready Ready to Bench?
Universal Music Group (UMG) and ElevenLabs have announced a multi-year agreement that will lead to the development of a dedicated platform for musical creation, aimed at fans. This new platform will allow users to produce remixes, mashups, new interpretations of tracks, and what the press release defines as “personalized vocal experiences,” using music from artists and songwriters who choose to join the initiative.
The platform is currently under development and does not yet have a defined commercial name. UMG emphasizes that access to the musical catalog will be limited to artists and songwriters who explicitly give their consent, without specifying at this time the size of the participating group or the financial terms of the agreement.
UMG ElevenLabs remix platform: why it matters
This new product will distinguish itself from solutions already offered by ElevenLabs, namely the Music API – which provides musical models for developers, media, and social platforms – and ElevenMusic, an application for generating and modifying original tracks with control over voice, instrumentation, style, and arrangement. Both of these were created without licenses from major record labels.
“By combining UMG’s global community and its expertise in rights management with our AI models and products, we will enable artists and songwriters to create new experiences for their fans, ensuring they are fairly compensated,” stated Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs. The company highlights that this agreement represents a significant milestone: it is the first audio AI enterprise to obtain a license from the world’s largest record label.
UMG is also internally developing an AI music platform in collaboration with Udio and has entered into licensing agreements with companies such as Spotify, Nvidia, and Klay. Recently, Suno presented its first models trained on musical catalogs licensed by Warner Music Group, BMG, and other industry partners, but did not include tracks from the Universal catalog.
On the legal front, Sony filed a lawsuit against Udio for alleged copyright infringement of 30,000 songs, while a German court ruled that Suno had indeed violated copyright. Other legal disputes were resolved through settlements: the dispute initiated by Warner against Udio in 2024 concluded with a license.
A coalition of major record labels, including UMG, has also requested that AI-generated tracks be excluded from international music charts. According to industry experts, licenses and legal disputes are two sides of the same coin: lawsuits define the cost of copyright, while agreements allow for the monetization of such rights.
Universal therefore presents itself to ElevenLabs as a potential commercial partner rather than a litigation counterpart. “Personalized vocal experiences” represent a particularly sensitive area for the record industry, as they concern the protection of artists’ voices.
What Changes and What Are the Effects
In 2023, Universal had requested the removal from streaming services of an AI-generated track that imitated the voices of two of its artists. In recent hours, the same company is licensing vocal work to ElevenLabs, a specialist in voice cloning. The logic underlying this decision appears to be that if synthetic voices are destined to spread, a major label prefers them to be used legally, with artist consent and adequate compensation.
ElevenLabs operates in compliance with the European AI Act. A consumer product that generates synthetic voices of identifiable individuals entails transparency obligations independent of copyright regularization; the license with Universal resolves the copyright issue but not that of labeling and disclosure. Issues regarding the management of fan-generated creations also remain open: who holds the rights to the generated track, under what license it can be distributed, and whether it can be uploaded to streaming services.
The founders of ElevenLabs are two Polish citizens, and the Polish state recently acquired a stake in the company for 11 million dollars. Staniszewski publicly stated that the company has reached revenue of 600 million dollars, data that The Next Web interprets as a signal of the growing weight of European companies in the artificial intelligence sector.
For a technology perceived as a threat to performers for three years, obtaining the signature of a major record label represents a significant achievement, beyond the details of the license itself.
Source and further reading on UMG ElevenLabs remix platform: original article.
* Content created with the assistance of artificial intelligence systems.