The news: Startup ElevenLabs launched Eleven Music, a platform that gives brands and creators copyright-safe tools to generate custom music and audio.

• Users can enter prompts in plain English—such as “make me an upbeat disco track with background vocals”—and get a track within minutes, per The Wall Street Journal.
• ElevenLabs partnered with digital rights agencies like Merlin Network and Kobalt Music Group to train its model on human-created work. It aims to sign deals with major labels like Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group.

Why it matters: Offerings like Eleven Music can reduce music production costs and help brands create unique, customizable soundtracks for their campaigns.

• The company’s AI can generate music quickly and adapt it for various formats and platforms—like longer songs for connected TV (CTV) ads and shorter ones for YouTube Shorts—which could help with fast-turnaround ad creation.
• Eleven Music could also be used for background audio in apps or vocal-led songs for commercials, letting brands avoid hunting for the perfect track or voice to fit an ad’s message or mood.

Yes, but: There’s a risk of the public rejecting AI-generated music, especially due to the possibility of the tech taking over human jobs. ElevenLabs must prove its content’s value in the face of consumer skepticism.

Only 19% of US teens and adults think AI creates better music than humans, per Hub Research, and 45% of US adults think AI will reduce job opportunities for musicians over the next 20 years, per Pew Research.

Signing on? Despite ElevenLabs’ ambition to partner with major music labels, this may not be the next era of content licensing partnerships like those between Amazon and The New York Times or OpenAI and Axios, Axel Springer (our parent company), Vox, News Corp, and The Atlantic.

• Music labels aren’t fighting the same battles as web publishers as they aren’t reliant on web traffic or ad revenues, both of which have been undercut by AI summaries and search tools.
• With less at stake, labels have less incentive to sign licensing deals.

Our take: Services like ElevenLabs can democratize music creation for video campaigns and empower smaller brands to create original campaign content with minimal effort. But with growing concern over AI’s role in creative industries, brands should remain transparent about AI use, keep human creatives on staff as backstops, and use AI when it can complement rather than replace human work.