ElevenLabs has made Music v2.5 available in its app and through its API, on a free tier that allows five downloads a day and a Pro tier that allows 400 a month. Commercial use is permitted, with the scope depending on industry and purpose, and free-tier users must credit ElevenLabs. Music v2, the previous version, keeps running. The release follows a licensing agreement with Universal Music Group that the company says applies only to future, separate products and does not cover Music v2.5.
Two restrictions sit on the output. Tracks created on the basis of other artists' songs cannot be downloaded, and imitating existing musicians is not permitted. The first of those is enforced at the download step rather than at generation, which implies the track gets made and the export is what stops.
On training data, ElevenLabs says its existing music models were built on "licensed tracks and music" and has declined to say which ones. That is four words of disclosure standing in for the entire provenance question.
The vagueness still leaves ElevenLabs in a different position from Suno, which is being sued over training models on copyrighted content without rightsholders' consent. Suno released new models this week as well.
The company also cites 47,885 pairs in a blind test. That figure is the size of the comparison, not its outcome; what the test actually showed is not part of what was announced.
Source: the-decoder.com
The Universal deal is the part worth watching, and it has been fenced off with care. A major-label agreement is the strongest signal a music-generation company can send that it intends to operate inside the industry rather than around it, and ElevenLabs has attached that signal to products it has not yet built, while the model it shipped this week runs on a corpus it will describe only in general terms. Both things can be true simultaneously. Together they read as a company buying legitimacy on credit and shipping in the meantime.
The tiers deserve a second look too. Five downloads a day works out to roughly 150 a month; Pro, at 400, is under three times that. For a product whose entire value is the exported file, that is a narrow gap between free and paid, and it prices Pro as a modest allowance rather than professional capacity.
The perimeter here is drawn with unusual precision: the label deal on one side, the shipped model on the other, a download button that refuses tracks built on other artists' work, and a training-set description four words long. Precision of that kind is generally written by people who expect to be asked about it under oath, which is where the competitor named in this story currently finds itself.