Reinier Zonneveld's GasLab promises artists a share of AI music. The fine print says profit, not a rate

Dutch techno DJ and producer Reinier Zonneveld has launched GasLab, short for Generative AI Solutions Lab, with $1 million in pre-seed funding. Tech.eu names the backers as Eric Demuth, co-founder and executive chairman of Bitpanda, and Bas Beerens, founder of WeTransfer, along with other European entrepreneurs. The pitch is that AI music should credit and pay the artists it learns from. What makes GasLab unusual is who is making that pitch: a touring artist with a label, not a lab that scraped the internet and is now negotiating with rights holders.

That is worth taking seriously. It is also worth reading what GasLab has actually promised, because the published terms are thinner than the headline.

What is GasLab?

According to Tech.eu, GasLab is a generative music platform built on music supplied by artists and labels who are happy to take part. The core team is Zonneveld, his long-time business partner Cas Luuring, and Thijs Emondts, a former VC partner and Uber general manager. It isn't open yet. The GasLab site says it "opens in waves" and offers only a guest-list sign-up, under the line "Generative music, by artists, for artists". Besides Zonneveld, the one other artist pictured there is Kiki Solvej.

The idea grew out of an earlier experiment. In January 2024, MusicTech reported that Zonneveld had built R², a model trained on more than 2,000 hours of his own compositions and live sets, designed to play with him on stage. His manifesto says it played back-to-back with him live in 2024. He calls it the world's first AI based on a single artist's work. We haven't verified that "first", and it is a big claim. GasLab is the step from one consenting artist to many.

What does it promise on credit and pay?

Tech.eu describes the mechanism. A proprietary attribution model, the "Digital Notary", compares each generated output with the participating catalogue and logs which artists and rights holders contributed, on both the master and the publishing side. Each track gets a permanent ID and a watermark tied to that record. Every artist attributed on a track gets "an economic right to it". When GasLab earns from subscriptions or releases, the record is the basis for sharing that revenue. GasLab also says the engine could serve other AI platforms.

The manifesto, signed by Zonneveld as co-founder, goes a step further. It says artists and rights holders "become partial owners" of the music GasLab generates. If an output earns money on radio, streaming or elsewhere, it says GasLab will detect it, collect the money and distribute it. And it says GasLab shares "our profit from the platform" with the artists and rights holders it trains on.

What is missing?

Read the two documents side by side and four gaps stand out.

• No number. Neither page gives a percentage, a split between platform and artists, or a split between master and publishing owners. There is no payment timeline either, and Tech.eu's report doesn't give one.
• Profit versus revenue. Tech.eu describes revenue sharing. The founder's own page says profit. A start-up spending a pre-seed round can report no profit for years, so a profit share can be worth nothing for a long time. Our reading is that the manifesto's wording is the weaker promise. GasLab should say which one it means.
• No method or audit. Neither source explains how the Digital Notary decides how much of an output came from whom, or who checks it. Our reading: the attribution engine is the pay rate. Whoever controls the model that measures influence controls each artist's cut.
• "Partial owner" of what? The manifesto doesn't say whether this "economic right" is a copyright share, a contractual royalty or something else. It also doesn't say how it sits alongside existing label and publishing deals. The consent described by Tech.eu comes from "artists and labels". When a label opts a catalogue in, the artist on it may not have been asked.

None of that makes GasLab a bad actor. These are the right questions for any attribution scheme, and GasLab has invited them by putting attribution at the centre of its pitch.

How does it compare with Grimes and Imogen Heap?

Two artists got here earlier, by different routes.

Grimes chose simplicity. In April 2023 she offered a 50% royalty split on any successful AI song that used her voice. TuneCore's distribution terms for GrimesAI show what that became. Every release takes a 50% revenue split with GrimesAI, however little of the track uses the voice. GrimesAI must be credited as a main or featured artist. The vocal must come from the official Elf.Tech platform, and releases can't go to YouTube Content ID. TuneCore says the model was trained only on vocals and content Grimes owns, and that GrimesAI claims no ownership of the recording or composition. It is crude, but anyone can check it: one artist, one voice, one number, written down.

Imogen Heap chose control. In June 2024 MusicTech reported that, in an interview with MusicRadar, Heap revealed she'd had numerous offers from companies to make an AI model of her voice, and turned them down. "I began to feel like I had no control over the whole thing," she told MusicRadar, as reported by MusicTech. She built ai.Mogen with an audio engineer on an open-source model instead. Later that year she partnered with Jen on StyleFilter, trained with her permission on two of her singles, with a timestamped hash for each new track logged on a blockchain. That record proves when a track was made, not whose music shaped it. Neither report describes payment terms.

GasLab is trying something neither of them did: many artists, with pay weighted by measured influence. That is harder, and potentially fairer than a flat split. But unlike Grimes's 50%, nobody outside GasLab can check it yet.

What we think

The founder being an artist is a real advantage, but it is not a contract. Zonneveld's credibility comes from R², where his own catalogue trained a model that was, in effect, consenting to itself. Getting other artists' work involves the same old trade-offs between the platform, labels, publishers and the artists themselves. For related approaches, see how Splice pays sample creators per use, GRAI licenses an opt-in dataset through a catalogue owner and Udio's Starstruck routes opt-in through rights holders. Each reads well until you ask for the rate, or ask who actually said yes.

We think attribution is where the money will be decided. Paying for outputs only works if the influence is measured by someone independent of the company paying out. GasLab wants to sell its Digital Notary to other platforms. That would make it both a player and the scorekeeper, so it is the one company that most needs an outside audit.

If you are an artist or a label thinking about joining the guest list, our advice is to ask four things in writing first. What percentage goes to contributors? Is it a share of revenue or of profit? Who checks the attribution, and can you see your own records? And what can you withdraw, and when? If GasLab publishes those answers, it could set the standard it says it wants. Until then, "credited and compensated" is a promise without terms.