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Grimes' 50/50 voice offer, three years on: 168 GrimesAI releases. Did open licensing work?

In 2023 Grimes let anyone release songs with an AI copy of her voice in exchange for half the master royalties. About three years on, the GrimesAI profile lists 168 releases, the Elf.Tech site has gone quiet and Grimes now says humans still have to tell the story. Here is what worked, what didn't, and what other artists can borrow.

Key facts

  • What happened: on 24 April 2023 Grimes offered a 50% royalty split on any successful AI song using her voice; Elf.Tech, built with CreateSafe, followed within a week, and TuneCore began distributing approved GrimesAI collaborations on 12 June 2023.
  • What is at stake: TuneCore requires a 50% split with GrimesAI on every release however little of the AI voice it uses, a GrimesAI credit, a stem from the official Elf.Tech platform and no YouTube Content ID; GrimesAI claims no ownership of the composition unless it is a Grimes cover.
  • Why it matters: AI Musicpreneur counted 168 releases on the GrimesAI Spotify profile as of June 2026, with about 37,900 monthly listeners against roughly 7.9 million for Grimes herself. It is the longest-running public test of an artist licensing their own voice.

In April 2023, days after an AI fake of Drake and The Weeknd went viral, Grimes went the other way. On 24 April she posted that she would split 50% of royalties on any successful AI-generated song that used her voice, "same deal as I would with any artist I collab with", according to Resident Advisor. She added that she had no label and no legal bindings. Three years later it is still the clearest public test of an artist licensing their own voice to strangers. So did it work?

What was the deal?

The tweet quickly became a product. Elf.Tech, built with the development studio CreateSafe, turns an uploaded or recorded vocal into a "GrimesAI-1" voiceprint and returns it as a WAV stem, AI Musicpreneur records, with the beta announced on 30 April 2023. The written terms were narrower than the tweet. Grimes told users "we ask for 50% splits on master recording royalties", and said publishing money was a "small chance" her team couldn't guarantee, Music Business Worldwide reported.

On 12 June 2023 TuneCore announced it would distribute GrimesAI collaborations once Grimes had approved them. Its help-centre rules, still online, are the most precise statement of the terms:

  • Half the master, always. Every release needs a 50% split with GrimesAI, "regardless of what percent of your release utilizes the AI sound".
  • Credit. GrimesAI must be listed as a main or featured artist.
  • One source. The stem must come from the official Elf.Tech platform, and no other AI may be used to imitate her voice.
  • No covers, no Content ID. Covers of copyrighted songs are banned, and GrimesAI releases can't be sent to YouTube Content ID.
  • The song stays yours. GrimesAI claims no ownership of the sound recording or the underlying composition, unless the composition is a Grimes cover.

The creator also needs a paid TuneCore Unlimited plan. Anything that breaks the rules is refused or taken down, "no exceptions".

What came out of it?

The first official release, Kito's "Cold Touch", came within weeks, and Grimes called it a "masterpiece", Hunger reported. By October 2023 CreateSafe and the platform Slip.stream were offering more than 200 GrimesAI tracks to video creators, according to MBW.

As of June 2026, AI Musicpreneur counts 168 releases on the GrimesAI Spotify profile, which it describes as mostly third-party Elf.Tech output rather than music Grimes made herself. It puts the profile at about 37,900 monthly listeners, against about 7.9 million on Grimes' main profile. We haven't independently counted the releases, and Spotify figures change daily.

The public offer has gone quiet. When we checked for this piece, the Elf.Tech home page showed nothing but the words "I am evolving." Signal to Song, which archives the 2023 version of the site, notes the same message on the live one. We found no announcement that the scheme has ended, and TuneCore's rules are still published, but those rules require a stem from a platform that no longer shows a way in.

In June 2026 Grimes was still positive about the idea. Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen alongside Warner Music Group's Robert Kyncl, she described Elf.Tech as a way to feel free at a time when voice cloning was happening anyway, and argued that AI can make music but humans still have to tell the story, Fortune reported.

What we think

As a licence, it worked. Consent, credit and payment were all written down, the split was collected automatically by the distributor rather than chased by hand, and none of it needed a lawsuit. That is more than most of the industry managed in the same three years.

As a business, the numbers are modest. 168 releases across roughly 37 months is about four or five a month. On AI Musicpreneur's snapshot, GrimesAI draws under 0.5% of Grimes' own monthly listeners. Opening a famous voice to everyone produced a small, steady trickle of approved music, not a flood. The approval step is probably why: it protects her name, but someone has to listen to every submission, and that doesn't scale for free.

The split was more generous to Grimes than it first sounds. "Regardless of what percent" means an eight-bar hook and a full lead vocal cost the same half of the master. For a producer who wrote, played and mixed everything else, that is a steep price for a feature that may last a few seconds. A fairer template would scale with use, or cap the artist's share when the voice is a minor part.

The masters-and-publishing split is the part other artists should copy. Grimes took half the recording income and left the composition with the person who wrote the song. That keeps songwriting credit honest: the voice is a performance, not authorship. It also tracks what she said in Aspen. The voice is an instrument, and the person using it is still the one telling the story.

The weak point is dependency. Every legitimate GrimesAI release relies on one tool, one partner company and one distributor's rules. With the Elf.Tech site reduced to a holding message, the official route is unclear, while anyone with a voice-cloning model can still imitate her and nothing in the TuneCore terms reaches them. We saw the same question when HYBE began winding up Supertone: when the company holding a voice model stops, who controls it?

If you are an artist thinking about licensing your voice, take four things from this:

  1. Split the master, keep the publishing separate, and say so in the terms, not just in a post.
  2. Collect through the distributor's split tool, so payment doesn't depend on goodwill.
  3. Scale the share to use, so small features aren't priced like duets.
  4. Plan for the tool closing: where the model lives, who can switch it off, and what happens to releases already out.

Not every artist wants a public clone. Many will prefer AI that stays inside their own process. Veena, for example, describes its CoProducer as building a track with you, layer by layer, which keeps the artist directing each step. The contrast with label-run models is sharper still. Udio's planned Starstruck app lets fans make songs as opted-in artists but keeps every output inside the app, and the opt-in usually runs through the label. Grimes let strangers release music and earn from it. Whatever happened to Elf.Tech, that was a more artist-controlled experiment, and the industry should study it before copying the walled-garden version.

Sources

Sources

  1. Distributing collaborations with GrimesAI, TuneCore Help Center (primary source). Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  2. TuneCore partners with CreateSafe, TuneCore (primary source). Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  3. Elf.Tech home page, Elf.Tech (primary source). Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  4. Grimes launches AI software that lets users create music with her voice, Resident Advisor. Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  5. Grimes launches AI project in partnership with development studio CreateSafe, Music Business Worldwide. Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  6. Grimes and CreateSafe partner with Slip.stream to make 200+ GrimesAI songs available to content creators, Music Business Worldwide. Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  7. Grimes, AI Musicpreneur. Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  8. Grimes Elf.Tech (2023) archive, Signal to Song. Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  9. Grimes says AI can make music, but humans must still tell the story, Fortune. Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  10. Grimes calls the first official AI song cloning her voice a "masterpiece", Hunger. Accessed 23 Oct 2026.
  11. Veena home page, Veena Studio. Accessed 23 Oct 2026.

Researched with AI assistance, written and checked by WATMM Desk.

Tags

aiai-musicgrimesvoice-cloninglicensingartist-rights

Published by the company behind Veena. Disclosures

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