Techno DJ Reinier Zonneveld raises $1M for GasLab, an AI music generator that credits and pays the artists behind every track

Techno DJ Reinier Zonneveld just raised about $1 million for GasLab, an AI music generator that shows you which artists shaped every track it makes, and pays them for it.

GasLab announced the pre-seed round in Amsterdam on October 15, 2026. Eric Demuth, co-founder and executive chairman of Bitpanda, and Bas Beerens, founder of WeTransfer, invested alongside other European entrepreneurs.

Zonneveld ranks No. 21 in DJ Mag’s 2026 Top 100 DJs and runs the label Filth on Acid. GasLab isn’t open yet, but you can join the GasLab guest list for private testing ahead of a public launch.

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The current state of generative AI has a major flaw: It takes from artists but gives nothing back.

How GasLab’s Digital Notary credits and pays artists

GasLab only trains on music from artists and labels who agreed to be on there.

Every time someone generates a track, GasLab’s attribution model, which it calls the Digital Notary, compares the result with that catalogue. It then writes an attribution record of the participating music and rights holders that shaped the track, on both the master and the publishing side. The master is the recording and publishing is the song underneath it, so the people who played it and the people who wrote it can both show up.

Each track gets a permanent ID and a watermark linked to that record. And every artist attributed on the track gets an economic right to it, so if an AI track blows up, the artists behind it share in the success, GasLab says.

GasLab also uses the record to split the money. When it earns from subscriptions or releases, the contributors whose music shaped a track get a share. In his manifesto, Zonneveld goes one step further: if a GasLab output gets played on radio or streaming, GasLab says it will detect it, collect the money and pay it out to the artists and rights holders.

GasLab says the attribution engine could also serve other GenAI platforms. Musical AI builds the same kind of attribution tech for AI companies, and so does Sureel, which Warner Music bought in June.

Reinier Zonneveld’s R2 model, the starting point for GasLab

Zonneveld trained as a classical pianist from the age of 3 and taught himself electronic production. He also holds the world record for the longest electronic music live set.

About 8 years ago, he and his long-term friend and business partner Cas Luuring started working with machine learning. That work became R2, an AI model trained on Zonneveld’s own catalogue, which played back to back with him at his R² festival in August 2024.

“Since I have kept all of my (mostly crappy) recordings since I was a little kid, we had a lot of original training data to work with,” Zonneveld writes in the manifesto.

Zonneveld and Luuring now run GasLab with Thijs Emondts, a former VC partner and Uber general manager.

“First and foremost I am a musician and I believe it must always pay to be an artist,” Zonneveld said in GasLab’s announcement.

Where to try GasLab first: the guest list and ADE 2026

GasLab opens in waves. Leave your email on the guest list at gaslab.ai and you’ll get an invite to private testing before the public launch.

If you’re a musician, a label or another rights holder, you can contact the GasLab team about adding your music.

The first public look comes at Amsterdam Dance Event 2026:

• Thursday, October 22 and Friday, October 23: Zonneveld speaks at the ADE conference.
• Sunday, October 25: he plays an 8-hour live set.
• All week: posters across Amsterdam ask “What’s your ADE anthem?” and a QR code leads to a GasLab sneak peek, where you type a prompt, get a track and see the artists attributed to it.

So if you’re in Amsterdam that week, scan a poster. It’s the first chance to see a Digital Notary record for a prompt of your own.