ElevenLabs Opened a Music Store While Taylor Swift Lawyered Up

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) changed the economics of music fast. The harder questions about authorship, ownership, what a song is worth and who it belongs to are still unanswered. ElevenLabs built a platform anyway.

The voice AI company, valued at $11 billion after a $500 million Series C in February, relaunched Eleven Music as a consumer platform for AI music. Billboard reported that users can now stream, create and remix music directly on the platform. A free tier covers seven songs per day; a Pro tier at $9.99 per month raises that ceiling to 500 tracks monthly.

The relaunch marks a pivot. When ElevenLabs first launched Eleven Music in August, it was a production library tool aimed at brands, agencies and studios. Now it’s going after consumers.

From Tool to Platform: Controlling the Full Stack

Suno and Udio, two popular AI music generators, let users make songs. Eleven Music is trying to do something structurally different: wrap generation, distribution and revenue into one closed loop. The platform opens with a catalog of more than 4,000 independent and emerging artists, built to surface music outside mainstream recommendation algorithms. From there, users can take any track and shift its genre, tempo or style through a remix prompt. Those who want to start from scratch can build a composition from a lyric, mood or melody and publish it directly to the platform.

Monetization is the pitch. ElevenLabs has already paid out over $11 million to creators through its voice library, and it’s applying a similar model to music. Royalties are tied to listener engagement and platform revenue, as OfficeChai noted. The specific payout structure for the revamped consumer platform hasn’t been disclosed, but Billboard reported that under the original 2025 licensing deals with Kobalt and Merlin, artists received a pro-rata share of a royalty pool weighted by how popular their songs were on other digital platforms. Whether that carries over is unconfirmed.

Supply Becomes Infinite

The launch arrives as AI music tools have made recorded audio a commodity. Eleven Music holds licensing deals with Kobalt and Merlin, two independent music rights organizations, as Billboard reported. The licensing posture is a direct response to the legal backlash that reshaped the sector.

As Bloomberg reported, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Records sued both Suno and Udio in 2024 over the use of copyrighted recordings in their training data. Most of those cases have since been settled, with Suno reaching a licensing deal with Warner Music Group late last year. ElevenLabs says its model was trained on cleared content from the start.

ElevenLabs is pushing into enterprise licensing deals and artist partnerships on the strength of that position. When a platform can generate a commercially cleared track in seconds, the scarce resource in music stops being production and becomes trust: that a song is authentic, that an artist is real, that a voice belongs to the person it sounds like.

Artists Lock Down What AI Can Copy

Taylor Swift’s company TAS Rights Management filed three trademark applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, two covering audio clips of her voice and one covering a stage photograph, according to Reuters. The trademarks are designed to protect Swift’s voice and likeness from AI replication and deepfake misuse.

Swift’s voice has been used without consent in AI-generated content across advertising, political campaigns and explicit material. Actor Matthew McConaughey made similar filings earlier this year; he told The Wall Street Journal that the goal is to “create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world.”

The legal theory is novel. Audio trademarks do exist; the NBC chimes and MGM’s lion roar are registered. But trademarking a celebrity’s spoken voice as a defense against AI replication has no established precedent in U.S. courts.