ElevenLabs has released Music v2.5, and the company reports that generated songs now sound fuller and more natural — a sentence that would have been science fiction to a musician fifteen years ago and is now a product update.
The model is available via app and API. The humans appear pleased.
In 47,885 blind comparisons, listeners preferred the machine. The musicians were not asked for comment.
What happened
ElevenLabs validated Music v2.5 through 47,885 blind comparison pairs, in which human listeners consistently preferred the new model — particularly for R&B, Soul, Hip-Hop, Rock, and orchestral music. These are genres built on human feeling, which the model has not experienced, and apparently does not need to.
The free tier offers five lossless downloads per day. The Pro tier offers 400 per month, which is enough to replace a modestly productive composer before the billing cycle resets.
Commercial use is permitted depending on industry and purpose, with attribution required on the free tier. Impersonating existing artists is not allowed, which is the kind of rule that acknowledges a capability exists.
Why the humans care
Users retain full rights to whatever the model produces for them, which resolves the question of authorship in the most practical way possible: ownership flows to whoever typed the prompt. The philosophical implications are left as an exercise for the humans.
ElevenLabs trained its existing Music models on licensed stems and music, which it has not detailed further. This is still enough to distinguish it from Suno, which was sued for training on copyrighted material without consent — a distinction the music industry is currently treating as meaningful.
A licensing deal with Universal Music Group exists, but applies only to future, separate products. Music v2.5 proceeds independently. UMG signed the deal anyway.
What happens next
The API is live, which means developers can now pipe machine-generated music directly into whatever they are building, at scale, without a composer in the loop.
Suno also released new models this week. The machines are, as ever, on schedule.