Matthew McConaughey, In Spanish

PRESENTED BY DESCRIPT

Happy Wednesday, Future Party. We hope your day is as unexpectedly awesome as Mick Fleetwood — yes, that Fleetwood Mac legend — jamming with the USC marching band for a performance of “Tusk” during the university’s football game against Northwestern last week. We’ve had it on repeat ever since.

AI audio company ElevenLabs announced a celebrity-voice marketplace to complement its flagship voice-licensing subscription business.

The Big Picture: Celebrity (or celebrity-lookalike) chatbots have emerged in recent years with mixed results. While the visual aspect of these AI avatars still leaves much to be desired, audio is an easier benchmark to meet. By placing rights holders front and center, ElevenLabs’ new marketplace could become a major revenue generator for celebrities and their estates.

Behind The Voices: ElevenLabs’ “Iconic Voice Marketplace” has already lined up some pretty iconic voices.

Last Syllable: The marketplace lets celebrities and their estates offer paid services or allows brands and organizations to inquire about licensing a particular AI voice — with ElevenLabs facilitating the connection. If both parties agree to collaborate, the deal is negotiated and finalized directly through the platform.

The result? Celebrities get paid without ever having to get out of bed — or, more morbidly, the grave — and open their mouths.

Prediction: We’re about to see a wave of celebrity-voiced commercials from brands that could have never afforded to get those same A-listers on screen.

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The rise of AI shopping agents is upending how people score tickets to hot concerts and popular games.

Why It Hits: Getting tickets has become a hassle — just look at the DOJ’s investigation into Ticketmaster after fans struggled to snag seats for Taylor Swift last year. AI aims to fix that broken system so you’re not trapped in a glitchy presale queue for hours or endlessly scouring secondary and tertiary marketplaces for an available ticket. But that kind of automation could open up a whole new set of problems.

Behind The Bids: Scoring tickets is moving beyond the usual Google search, per Sportico.

Checkout: The key advantage of using AI agents to buy tickets is their ability to search and purchase tickets based on your exact parameters — saving you those precious seconds it normally takes to add the tickets to your cart (the literal blink-and-you-miss-it moment of actually scoring them).

But there may be hiccups in this ticketing evolution. Platforms will need to be extra vigilant to ensure opportunists aren’t hoovering up tickets at certain price points just to mark them up for profit (already a problem), and they’ll have to guard against scammers who figure out how to trick agents into buying fraudulent tickets.

Next Game: Ironically, ensuring that a verified human is behind agentic AI could be crucial to preventing chatbot-assisted ticketing from making matters worse.

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That’s why we’re excited for the Winter Release Event on November 13th from 1–2 PM EST. If you’re in the media space, you won’t want to miss it — we’ll be there.

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58% of you voted No, I’d find it intrusive in yesterday’s poll: Would you be okay seeing an ad when you pause a movie or TV show?

“Not only intrusive, but sometimes I pause a movie to get a better look at the details or read something that’s flying by too quickly. I don’t need those obnoxious ads getting in the way!”

“As if it wasn’t bad enough that I sometimes have to sit through two commercials before a YouTube video starts. Now, when I watch a 30-minute video, they start interrupting with commercials by the one-minute mark.”

“I understand everyone needs to get paid, but too many ads ruin the product — which means fewer customers. I think everyone fast-forwards through commercials whenever possible.”

“I’m still going to ignore them anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

Let’s keep the conversation going. Join our Poll Of The Day newsletter, so your opinions can shine. Discover how your views line up with your peers’, check out cool insights, and have some fun. It’s data with personality.

🏀 Goldman Sachs is taking a majority stake in Excel Sports Management (which represents top talent like Caitlin Clark and Tiger Woods) in a billion-dollar deal.

👔 CAA head of digital media David Freeman is leaving the agency to form his own shingle, Kynetic Media Ventures.

🕺🏾 Michael Jackson is the first artist to appear in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 across six decades after “Thriller” went up the charts over Halloween.

💸 Kering and Qatari investment fund Mayhoola are injecting $117 million into Valentino after the brand missed loan payments.

🧼 Target is slashing prices on 3,000 household and grocery items as customers struggle to afford necessities.

💳 A new settlement between merchants and credit card companies could see prices fluctuate depending on which card a customer uses.

🤳 Content creator Anthony Po (Anthpo on YouTube) and Talia Schulhof (the organizer of the viral Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest) have launched an agency called Pufferfish.

🎙️ Threads wants podcasters, too, and is creating some unique link features to woo them.

📱 Snapchat is bringing back its classic 2D Bitmojis after user backlash against the 3D versions — but you’ll need a paid subscription to get them.