Spotify joined up with the AI voice generation platform ElevenLabs last year to allow rights holders who created audiobooks using ElevenLabs to upload those books to Spotify. They have just announced they will be taking this collaboration a step further in a feature that in June will be launched as an invitation-only beta. I'll quote the key sentence from the Investor Day statement on this: “Built directly into Spotify for Authors, and powered by ElevenLabs' digital voice technology, authors can now access seamless audiobook generation and publishing without exclusive contracts.”
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
What This Means for Self-Publishing Authors
The feature is directly aimed at self-publishing authors. By making it almost effortless to create AI-generated narration for audiobooks, the intention is, no doubt, to make distributing those titles via Spotify an effortless default. It's interesting to note that Spotify has kept true to their general approach of not requiring exclusivity. You can take those same audiobooks and distribute them anywhere.
The same Investor Day announcement also hinted at coming changes for listeners, including options for more listening hours in Audiobooks+.
Voice Actors Fight Back
This comes as a new lawsuit puts the spotlight on technology's relationship to the other creative rights holders in audiobooks: voice actors. ElevenLabs is one of nine companies being sued under Illinois' Biometric Information Policy Act (BIPA).
The claim being made is that the companies failed to follow the correct procedure before collecting and using people's voices in the training of large model voice generation tools, noting that under BIPA:
“Before a company can collect a voiceprint, it must inform the subject in writing, disclose the purpose and duration of the collection, and obtain a written release.”
The headline for the press release from the law firm pursuing the action puts the claim very simply: “A multi-billion voice AI industry is being built on the voiceprints of real people without their consent, complaints say.”
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