Thomas Edison never recorded an advertisement. Mark Twain never narrated an audiobook. Amelia Earhart never fronted an airline campaign. All three can now be hired to do exactly that through ElevenLabs’ Iconic Marketplace, a licensing platform connecting brands with the rights holders of history’s most recognizable voices. The catalog spans entertainment legends, sports heroes, musical pioneers and historical figures, and continues to expand. Stan Lee’s voice joined the platform in May, built from professional recordings that ElevenLabs said capture “his unmistakable warmth, wit and energy.”
The mechanics work like a talent agency rather than a software product. A brand, studio or publisher browses the catalog and submits a project request describing the format, audience and intended use. ElevenLabs then connects that request to the rights holder directly, and every commercial use requires the rights holder’s approval and signed terms before any audio is generated, according to ElevenLabs.
Approved uses span film and documentary narration, advertising, games, audiobooks, podcasts and educational content. Sir Michael Caine became one of the first major living actors to join at the marketplace’s launch, framing the platform as additive rather than replacing human performers. “It’s not about replacing voices; it’s about amplifying them, opening doors for new storytellers everywhere,” Caine said in November. ElevenLabs CEO and Co-Founder Mati Staniszewski called the launch “a true breakthrough for ethical sourcing and licensing of celebrity content.”
Voice Is Becoming Licensable Property Like a Name or Likeness
For historical figures like Edison and Twain, whose voices were reconstructed from archival recordings rather than cloned from a living person, the marketplace extends a licensing model that has existed for decades in image and likeness rights into audio for the first time at commercial scale.
ElevenLabs has partnered with talent and IP agencies including CMG Worldwide, which manages the estates of numerous deceased celebrities, “to bring more legendary voices and estates to the Iconic Marketplace.” The catalog has since expanded beyond individual performers into licensed franchise characters, including Hasbro properties, according to the marketplace’s own listings.
That expansion into estate management is also where the platform draws its sharpest structural tension. ElevenLabs frames the marketplace as solving what it calls “a key ethical challenge in AI-driven media creation,” enabling what the company describes as ethical sourcing and licensing rather than unauthorized cloning. Whether a consent-based model changes the underlying economics for working voice actors, who now compete for some jobs against a licensed historical or celebrity voice instead of another human performer, is a question the marketplace’s structure does not resolve on its own.
Licensing Solves Consent, Not the Broader Cloning Risk
However, that consent only covers one side of the voice-cloning problem: making sure the celebrities and estates who participate get paid and keep approval rights, but it does nothing to stop the same technology from being used without permission elsewhere.
Voice cloning now requires just 20 to 30 seconds of audio, while a convincing video deepfake can be built in 45 minutes using freely available software, according to the World Economic Forum. That barrier to entry shows up in the fraud data: PYMNTS Intelligence found that 58% of companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue reported encountering an AI-generated document or deepfake attack in the past year.
That is the gap the Iconic Marketplace does not close. A licensing deal can guarantee that Michael Caine or the Edison estate gets paid and keeps veto power over how their voice is used. It cannot stop someone else from cloning a company executive’s voice to authorize a wire transfer, or a customer’s voice to slip past a bank’s phone authentication. The marketplace builds trust for the voices that opted in. Every other voice is still on its own.
