$22 million earned by voice creators on ElevenLabs

In November 2025, voice creators on the ElevenLabs Voice Library had earned $11 million. Six months later, that number has doubled to over $22 million.

There are now 10,400+ creators earning on the platform, with voices spanning dozens of languages.

A new economic model for voice IP

For voice creators, the standard model has been one-time licensing fees. Record a session, deliver the files, and get paid once.

The Voice Marketplace replaces that with ongoing earnings from usage, on terms the creator sets, with consent and revocation controls built in.

As more content gets generated, the value of an authentic, well-licensed voice grows, and the creators who built the catalog earn from every generation.

The marketplace serves a wide range of creative workflows. Radio producers pull voices for station promos and commercials when no one else is in the building. Independent authors produce full-length audiobooks with marketplace voices for under $100 in credits. Game developers cast character voices across archetypes - from villains to narrators to sidekicks - without booking a single studio session. Podcasters, e-learning creators, and marketing teams use marketplace voices to scale content across languages and formats they could never staff for on their own. A single voice becomes a persistent asset that works across use cases, geographies, and time zones - and the creator earns every time it gets used.

The acceleration in payouts to $22 million reflects growing demand for this model, from a global community of voice creators and millions of customers.

How the marketplace works

A voice creator uploads a Professional Voice Clone, the highest-fidelity clone available on ElevenLabs. They set the terms under which their voice can be licensed: which use cases it can be used for, the price tier, and the notice period (up to two years). The voice is then reviewed by the ElevenLabs team for safety and policy compliance - including checks for naming guidelines, child safety, slurs, hate speech, and celebrity references - before it becomes available in the Voice Library.

Once live, the voice is discoverable through search, handpicked collections, and filters for certain languages, accents, categories, genders, ages, and qualities. Customers can also find voices by uploading an audio file to match against similar voices on the platform. When another ElevenLabs customer generates with that voice, the creator earns. Earnings are calculated based on usage and the terms the creator set.

The range of voices reflects the range of people behind them. The catalog includes late night announcers, rugged cowboys, sinister villains, quirky mad scientists, warm narrators, and animated cartoon characters - each one uploaded by a real creator who set their own licensing terms. For creators and marketers looking for the right voice, the marketplace functions as an instant casting library across styles, languages, and tones, without the overhead of booking studio sessions or negotiating individual licensing deals.

Importantly, creators retain control of their voice. They can update their licensing terms, restrict use cases, or remove their voice from the marketplace (with a notice period acting as a buffer for existing users). Every voice in the Voice Library comes with a free commercial use license for the customer using it.

Creator stories

The voices on the Voice Marketplace come from a global community: voice actors with decades of professional work, audiobook narrators, podcasters, radio professionals, language teachers, and emerging creators discovering they have a marketable voice.

Brad Barlow, radio host and voice creator

Brad Barlow is a program director and on-air host at Now 105.1 in Idaho. He has been in radio since he was 16. For years, he dreamt of being a station voice or cartoon voice actor, but every time he looked into it, the path felt gated. "Every time I would start to kind of look into it, I felt like the response I would get was maybe you can do it, but then this laundry list of stuff that would make me go, that doesn't sound fun. I just want to do it."

When he discovered the Voice Marketplace, he uploaded his voice and started creating characters - each one with a specific persona and backstory. He now has 20 voices live on the platform. For his top voice, Brad Clear Narrator for Documentary, he "wanted it to sound like somebody that was a real person that you could hang out with. And that's what I wanted it to do."

For Brad, the marketplace has been more than a side project. ElevenLabs now touches nearly every piece of audio he produces at the station - from commercials and promos to station identifiers. He uses a rotating cast of voices rather than a single station voice, pulling from the Voice Library to match the creative need of each project. "For people like me who don't have a staff, who are doing it by themselves - now we can make our stuff sound just as cool, just as big time, just as legit."

He has also become one of the platform's most vocal community members, and even demoed the product live at Author Nation in Las Vegas, generating audiograms for authors who had never heard their work read aloud.

"If ElevenLabs has caused any problem for me, it is my sleep quality - because I will wake up at two or three in the morning with an idea that I can't wait to go make."

Simon Patrick, audiobook producer and voice creator

Simon Patrick was one of the earliest users of ElevenLabs - user 202 on the original Discord, back when the ElevenLabs team was eight people. When his daughter Abby dropped out of college at 17 to write her first novel, Simon became her publisher. The books did well, but audiobook production was out of reach at $3,000+ per title.

When our first Text to Speech model was made available in beta in February 2023, Simon used ChatGPT to break Abby's 70,000-word manuscript into 5,000-character chunks and fed them into the platform one by one. That first paragraph back was the moment he knew. "She heard this first line and the first paragraph and she started to cry because it was delivering it the way she'd always imagined it being read."

His voice, Christopher, is a popular British male voice on the platform, and he earns a full-time living from it. His daughter Abby's voice, Amelia, one of the top voices on the platform, has earned income that allowed her to quit her day job and write full-time. She is now on her seventh published book.

"Authors often come to me who have dyslexic readers, partially sighted readers, who can now access their stories because a voice on ElevenLabs reads them to them," Simon says. "This is not generative AI. This is performative AI. It is taking stories and putting them into a format that more people can access."

Global voices, better representation

The marketplace model also improves the diversity of voice AI. By enabling creators from around the world to contribute their voices, the Voice Library has a wide catalog of voices in 32 languages, and dozens of accents and styles.

As well as showcasing the incredible range of human speech, the marketplace also helps meet demand from every part of the world. India is one of our fastest-growing creator markets. Creators and marketers producing content in Hindi and Indian English find the voices they need on the marketplace, and Indian voice talent is earning meaningfully on the platform.

What comes next

Our goal is to keep growing the Voice Marketplace and the community that benefits from it. We will add more voices in more languages, and help more creators to earn.

We are also building out the infrastructure that supports voice creators: better discovery for their voices, better analytics on how their voices are being used, and continued investment in the consent and control tooling that makes the marketplace trustworthy.

The success of the Voice Marketplace inspired us to bring the same model to music. The Music Marketplace launched in March with the same architecture, and we are exploring ways to expand this model across ElevenCreative.

If you want to license your voice on the marketplace, get started today.