Credit: ElevenLabs / Universal Music Group Universal Music Group and ElevenLabs have signed a multi-year licensing agreement and will build a music creation platform on it that lets fans produce remixes, mashups, new interpretations and personalised vocal experiences using tracks from artists who choose to take part. It is ElevenLabs’ first deal with a major label, covers product development as well as licensing, and extends to further artist and fan products over the coming years. The platform is in development, will be launched by ElevenLabs, and will sit separately from its existing Music API and ElevenMusic products. This is not the Universal catalogue; it is whichever artists and songwriters opt in, and the announcement names none of them, gives no launch date, and discloses no financial terms.
Everything that determines whether this matters, including how many artists say yes and what they are paid, is absent. What makes it a European story is who signed it. ElevenLabs was founded by two Poles, the Polish state took an $11mn stake in the company earlier this year, and its chief executive Mati Staniszewski has been talking publicly about $600mn of revenue. The first AI audio company to be licensed by the world’s largest record company is not American. “AI opens up incredible possibilities for interacting with our favorite music and artists,” said ElevenLabs cofounder and CEO Mati Staniszewski. “By combining UMG’s global community and rights management expertise with our AI models and products, we’ll enable artists and songwriters to create powerful new experiences for their fans, and ensure they are fairly compensated.” It also completes a pattern that has taken about eighteen months to form.
Suno launched models trained on licensed catalogue from Warner and BMG this week; Universal has already done an AI covers and remixes deal with Spotify, and the majors have taken equity positions in AI companies including Stability. Meanwhile, Sony is suing Udio over 30,000 songs, and a German court has found that Suno infringed copyright. The industry is running licensing and litigation at the same time, which is not a contradiction. It is the mechanism: the lawsuits set the price, and the deals collect it.
ElevenLabs already sells a music API to media and social platforms and an app for generating original songs, both built without a major-label licence. Adding a licensed product alongside them means the company can now offer developers something its rivals cannot, and it makes Universal a distribution partner rather than a plaintiff. For a company whose core technology has spent three years being described as a threat to performers, being the first one a major label signs is worth more than the licence fee. The specifically uncomfortable part is what ElevenLabs is good at.
Personalised vocal experiences, in a product built by a voice cloning company, touch the exact thing the industry fought hardest to control. Universal spent 2023 getting an AI-generated fake of two of its artists pulled from streaming services. It is now licensing vocal work to the company whose technology we have reported is reviving Stan Lee for digital cameos. That is not an accusation of hypocrisy.
It is the whole logic of the deal. If synthetic vocals are going to exist, a label would rather they exist under licence, with consent from the artist and a payment attached, than as an unlicensed track going viral on a Tuesday. Sir Lucian Grainge framed it as putting artists and fans at the centre and unlocking new revenue. “The most exciting possibilities for AI and music are those that put artists, songwriters, and fans at the center,” said Sir Lucian Grainge, Chairman & CEO, Universal Music Group. “UMG and ElevenLabs are aligned that responsible AI can inspire discovery, deepen engagement between artists and fans, and unlock new revenue opportunities for the creative community.” Whether it works depends on things nobody has said. If a fan can generate a personalised vocal from a participating artist, who owns the output, how is it licensed onwards, and can it be uploaded to a streaming service?
For Europe, there is one more thing worth watching. ElevenLabs operates under the AI Act, and a consumer product that generates synthetic voices of identifiable people carries transparency obligations regardless of how thoroughly the rights are cleared. A licence from Universal settles the copyright question, but it does not settle the labelling one.
