On Tuesday, ElevenLabs, an AI audio-generation startup, unveiled a new model that lets anyone generate music with the help of AI music generator and says it’s approved for commercial usage.
With this move, ElevenLabs has expanded beyond its primary goal of developing AI audio tools, which has been its primary focus for the last three years. Leading the way in text-to-voice AI technologies, ElevenLabs has also branched out into conversational bots and tools for multilingual speech translation.
ElevenLabs released samples of its AI-generated music in conjunction with the launch of AI music generator “Eleven Music“.
One has a synthetic voice rapping about how it left its hometown and traveled from “Compton to the Cosmos,” explaining how it “came up through the cracks with ambition in my pocket.” Hearing a machine mimic the vocabulary and influence of artists like Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, and N.W.A., who truly experienced the things that this technology is trying to replicate, is unnerving.
It’s more difficult for companies to get into music generation because of these worries about the content that AI systems are trained on.
The trade group that represents the American music industry, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), filed a lawsuit against Suno and Udio last year. According to these cases, Suno and Udio used copyrighted content to train their music-generation algorithms.
As stated by the reports, for now the companies are having talks about licensing agreements with top musical labels.
Furthermore, ElevenLabs disclosed deals with regard to using the materials of two digital publishing platforms for independent musicians, Merlin Network and Kobalt Music Group, for AI training.
Famous musicians like Adele, Nirvana, Mitski, Carly Rae Jepsen, as well as Phoebe Bridgers are promoted by Merlin, according to their website. Whereas Beck, Bon Iver, along with Childish Gambino are promoted by Kobalt.
Both the exact terms of these agreements as well as if the music of these artists has been used in training data are known.
