Universal Music and ElevenLabs Form Strategic AI Voice and Copyright Partnership

Universal Music Group and ElevenLabs announced a strategic partnership. Under the framework disclosed by both companies, Universal Music will rely on ElevenLabs' AI voice cloning, multilingual real-time translation and audio generation technologies to jointly develop commercial licensing models, multilingual interactive experiences and creative audio production tools, while protecting the copyright, likeness rights and voice assets of its artists. The principles published by the two sides include respect for artists' personality rights and reasonable revenue sharing, rather than a black-box scraping model, proceeding through explicit informed authorization and benefit mechanisms. Universal Music has previously brought legal actions and industry initiatives against unauthorized scraping of singers' voices to create deepfake songs.

Under the partnership framework, ElevenLabs will provide Universal Music with voice and sound synthesis solutions for the professional entertainment sector. Specific application scenarios include: helping signed singers convert original vocal samples into multilingual localized models, so that musical works released across borders can be recorded in multiple languages using the artist's own digital voice for lyrics, audiobook narration, podcast content or radio greetings; establishing officially certified digital voice twins for artists, providing voice content with legitimate copyright identification in animation and film dubbing, interactive games and immersive metaverse experiences; and using neural audio algorithms to assist acoustic restoration of old historical recordings, noise reduction and digital reconstruction of early audio archives.

The two companies also said they will conduct joint research and development on digital watermarking and synthetic asset traceability technology. ElevenLabs has committed to embedding end-side encrypted audio watermarks that cannot be removed by ordinary editing into all generated content involving Universal Music artists' voices, enabling third-party platforms and regulators to instantly verify whether the audio is officially authorized and to curb illegal misappropriation or fraudulent dissemination of artists' voices.