In the past few hours Universal Music Group And ElevenLabs they announced a multi-year licensing agreement and a broader collaboration, which will lead to a fan-facing music creation platform. Users will be able to produce remixes, mashups, new interpretations of the songs and what the press release calls personalized voice experiencesdrawing on the music of the artists and authors who choose to join. The platform will be launched ElevenLabs and is currently still in development without having a commercial name.
The announcement does not mention a single participating artist, does not indicate a launch date and does not state the financial terms. The platform will therefore not draw on the entire Universal catalogue, but only on the subset of those who participate, the size of which is currently unknown. The very conditions that determine the true scope of the operation, i.e. how many artists will sign and how much they will be paid, remain outside the press release.
The new product will remain distinct from the two that ElevenLabs already sells: the Music APIwith music templates made available to developers, media and social platforms, and ElevenMusicthe app for generating and editing original songs with control over vocals, instrumentation, style and arrangement. Both were born without any license from a major label. “By combining UMG’s global community and rights management expertise with our AI models and products, we will enable artists and creators to create new experiences for their fans, ensuring they are fairly compensated,” he said Mati Staniszewskico-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs.
For the company the value of the agreement exceeds the single contract: it is the first audio AI venture to be licensed by the world’s largest record labeland she’s not American. Its founders are two Poles, the Polish state took over a share this year from 11 million dollars and Staniszewski speaks publicly about 600 million dollars of revenues, elements that The Next Web lines up to read the agreement as a signal of European weight in the sector. For a technology that for three years has been described as a threat to performers, being the first to sign a major label weighs more than the license itself.
Settlements and lawsuits proceed together
UMG is already developing a music AI platform with Hear and has closed licensing agreements with Spotify, Nvidia and Klay. This week Sound presented its first catalog trained models licensed by Warner Music Group, BMG and other industry partners, but without Universal itself.
On the opposite front Sony sued Udio for 30,000 songs and a German court ruled that Suno violated copyright. Other lawsuits have already ended in settlement: the one started by Warner against Udio in 2024 ended in a settlement and a license. A few months ago, a coalition of major labels, including UMG, called for tracks generated in series by AI to be excluded from charts around the world.
Licenses and disputes do not contradict each other, they are the same mechanism: lawsuits set the price, agreements collect it. The Warner-Udio passage shows the entire journey, from the subpoena to the signed license. Universal, in this context, presents itself to ElevenLabs as a distribution channel rather than as a possible procedural counterpart.
The knot of synthetic voices
Personalized voice experiences touch on the very thing the recording industry has championed most forcefully. In 2023, Universal got an AI-generated song that mimicked the voices of two of its artists removed from streaming services, and today it licenses the vocal work to a voice-cloning company. The logic of the deal seems to be this: if synthetic vocals are going to exist anyway, a major label would prefer that they exist under license, with the artist’s consent and a payment attached, rather than as an unauthorized track that goes viral on any given day.
Then there remains the chapter of European rules. ElevenLabs operates under theAI Actand a consumer product that generates synthetic voices of identifiable people carries with it transparency obligations regardless of how rights have been settled: Universal’s license closes the copyright issue, but not the labeling issue. And, furthermore, there are no answers yet on managing what the fans will produce, that is who owns the generated songunder what license it can circulate downstream and whether it can be uploaded to a streaming service.
