ElevenLabs, an artificial intelligence voice generation company, is launching what it says is the first major AI-generated album made with full permission from human artists, including singer Liza Minnelli.
“The Eleven Album,” which the company released Wednesday on Spotify, includes tracks featuring 13 artists, such as Simon & Garfunkel’s Art Garfunkel and singer-pianist Michael Feinstein. The musicians created songs that blend their own signature sounds with the AI platform’s music generation features.
“I’ve always believed that music is about connection and emotional truth,” Minnelli, an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony (EGOT) winner, said in a statement. “What interested me here was the idea of using my voice and new tools in service of expression, not instead of it. This project respects the artist’s voice, the artist’s choices, and the artist’s ownership.”
London-based ElevenLabs, which launched in 2023, has been actively courting talent like Minnelli in hope of combating the anti-AI sentiments among creative artists.
The platform recently launched a marketplace system, in which public figures — including the likes of actor Michael Caine — can license their AI-cloned voices. That means companies must request explicit approval to use their voices or likenesses in media campaigns and creative projects. Last month, ElevenLabs also partnered with the estates of Hollywood icons Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Laurence Olivier to use their voices for its text narration app.
Sophia Noel, who works in the company’s partnerships team, said its music model is “fully trained on licensed music, so that means that we didn’t steal or take any music in order to create this system.”
“If you are a user of ElevenLabs, if you create music, you own that entirely,” she added.
More AI companies are pushing to striking licensing deals with talent across sectors — from film and TV to video games — to avoid blowback from artists who worry that their voices and likenesses are being used without their consent.
Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey filed to trademark himself this month to protect against unauthorized AI misuse.
The move followed several years of contentious debates in Hollywood over regulating AI.
In 2024, Scarlett Johansson slammed OpenAI for rolling out a GPT-4o chatbot with a voice “eerily similar” to hers even though she had declined its request to provide her voice. OpenAI removed the voice but said it was not an “imitation” of Johansson.
Rapper Drake also took down a diss track after Tupac Shakur’s estate threatened to sue him for using an AI-generated version of Shakur’s voice.
Even the actors union SAG-AFTRA stirred some controversy when it signed a deal with Replica Studios to license digitally replicated voices for use in video games. The union said the agreement was an attempt to pave an ethical path for performers to engage with AI.
Amid backlash, some deals have continued to be made.
Late last year, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group signed major licensing deals with the AI music studios Stability AI and Udio — with both music labels settling their copyright infringement lawsuits against Udio. Around the same time, UMG, WMG and Sony Music Entertainment also announced separate AI licensing agreements with Klay, a small music technology company based in Los Angeles.
AI-generated music has also become more prevalent and difficult to identify online.
Last summer, an indie band called The Velvet Sundown got more than 1 million plays on Spotify before the supposed group admitted, after heavy speculation, that all of its tracks are generated with AI. Since then, several Spotify artists — such as Breaking Rust, Cain Walker and Sienna Rose — have amassed millions of monthly listeners, despite being suspected of being AI.
Some listeners have lamented the incorporation of AI-generated music in their Spotify algorithms. Last year, around 6,300 users voted in a live poll for the platform to “introduce a clear label for AI-generated songs and provide an option to filter them out entirely.”
In response, Spotify announced plans last fall to implement clearer AI disclosures in song credits and stricter impersonation rules.
A Consumer Reports investigation last year found that several of the leading voice-cloning companies, including ElevenLabs, had bypassable safeguards that amounted to having users check a box “saying that the person whose voice is being cloned had given authorization.”
ElevenLabs’ partnerships lead, Dustin Blank, said in an email to NBC News that the platform’s more advanced professional voice-cloning feature requires users to verify their identities by “reading a text prompt within a specific timeframe to confirm their voice matches the training samples uploaded for replication.”
Noel, of ElevenLabs, also said each AI-cloned voice includes a “sonic fingerprint,” which incorporates a unique sound frequency that works like a digital watermark to show that the voice was generated by ElevenLabs.
As the company rolls out its new album, Feinstein, one of the artists who worked on the project, pushed back against critics of using AI in art.
“People who look at AI as a threat are not seeing the potential of what it can do with art direction and guidance,” he said in a statement. “AI may offer infinite options. Creators have to make the final choices.”
