Turning the Tide of the AI Music War
American AI audio company ElevenLabs, known for their generative AI voice synthesizer, launched their AI music platform, Eleven Music, in August. Now, the company has secured numerous investments for the spinoff, including tech giant NVIDIA.
Growing Investments in AI
Previously, the music platform had announced it was in talks for licensing deals with rightsholders Kobalt and Merlin, and as early as January 2025 was valued at over $3 billion USD. This latest investment from NVIDIA falls in line with the chipmaker’s recent forays into growing AI companies, with the company also investing $100 million into OpenAI.
Legal Contrast
The investment is the latest in the war over the future of generative AI broadly as well as that of AI music platforms, many of which are in their infancy compared to image or text-generating technology. With copyright law and creative ethics up in the air, ElevenLabs’ approach to sourcing material to train its models stands in contrast to other audio platforms, particularly music-generating rivals Udio and Suno. ElevenLabs signed a contract and training agreement with SourceAudio to be able to obtain pre-cleared songs for training with no legal gray area, whereas Suno and Udio are currently facing lawsuits from major record labels over alleged piracy of copyrighted music.
A Long-Term Relationship
According to both ElevenLabs co-founder Matt Staniszewski and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, the pair had already had a longstanding investment relationship, with the expansion into the music industry being the latest step. Besides financially supporting ElevenLabs in its earliest days of voice technology, Huang also used its features to generate voiceovers for his own speeches in other languages.
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