ElevenLabs Launches Music v2.5, Adds API Access and Free Tier for AI-Generated Songs

ElevenLabs has released Music v2.5, an update to its ElevenMusic generation model, making it available through both the ElevenLabs app and API with new free and paid tier options.

According to ElevenLabs, the new version produces "fuller and more natural" sounding tracks compared to its predecessor. The company backs this claim with a blind listening test involving 47,885 comparison pairs, in which listeners reportedly preferred v2.5 outputs most of the time — with the strongest preference gains in R&B, Soul, Hip-Hop, Rock, and orchestral music.

Pricing and Access

ElevenLabs is rolling out two access tiers for Music v2.5:

• Free tier: 5 lossless downloads per day, with attribution required for any commercial use
• Pro tier: 400 lossless downloads per month

Exact subscription pricing for the Pro tier was not disclosed in the announcement. Music v2.5 is also accessible via the ElevenLabs API, and the prior v2 model remains available for existing users.

Users retain rights to tracks they generate, and commercial use is permitted depending on industry and purpose. However, ElevenLabs blocks downloads of tracks that closely mimic other artists' existing songs, and the company states that imitating specific musicians is not allowed under its usage policy.

Training Data and Licensing

ElevenLabs says its Music models, including v2.5, were trained on "licensed stems and music," though the company did not detail the specific sources or scope of that licensing. This positions ElevenLabs differently from competitor Suno, which faces an ongoing lawsuit from major record labels alleging it trained models on copyrighted material without consent from rights holders. Suno released new models of its own this week, according to the report.

ElevenLabs separately signed a licensing agreement with Universal Music Group. The company clarified that this deal applies only to future, separate products and does not cover Music v2.5 or its existing music generation tools.

What This Means

ElevenLabs is positioning licensing transparency as a competitive differentiator in AI music generation, an area where legal exposure has become a defining risk factor following the Suno litigation. By emphasizing "licensed stems and music" as training data — even without full disclosure — the company is signaling to enterprise and commercial users that Music v2.5 carries lower legal risk than rivals facing active copyright suits.

The free tier with attribution requirements and a capped Pro tier download limit suggests ElevenLabs is testing a freemium funnel rather than aggressively pricing for enterprise scale yet. The absence of published API token pricing indicates this may still be an early-stage rollout, with usage-based pricing likely to follow as adoption data comes in. The real test will be whether the blind-test preference for v2.5 translates into measurable market share against Suno and other AI music tools already embedded in creator workflows.