Are people asking for this to exist? There isn't a big enough pool of talented humans willing to work for low pay, widely available cheap recording gear and free musical educational material, that music needs to be made even cheaper and soullessly?
I'm not against some AI uses, I use LLMs myself where it makes sense, but music is one of the things that we were told AI would free up all our time to do!!
Yes. I'm having fun making an indie game, which will most likely never see the light of day, let alone profit. I'd definitely pay cents to dollars to have fitting background music. There's no chance I'd pay for a human musician.
Why not? The experience of working with a freelancer for a piece of creative art is more or less like prompting except they take longer to reply, understand better most of the time, write/spell worse, but produce way better results, especially after two/three iterations ("prompts").
I occasionally commision visual art from young artists/students via Krita's web forum, and what I find to be true is that if I had AI do the same art, it would just be exactly what I ask the AI to do or iterate toward (I'm detail-oriented enough, and iteration rounds are cheaper and more plenty). If I ask a human instead, I get the somewhat-unpredictable input of another creative mind besides my own brain, and often this sums up to something greater.
It really depends on what you want/need, augment/extrapolate your own creativity with AI tools, or invite someone else's.
The AI debate is for now most often centered on whether AI is capable of replacing individuals, but replacing the results you get when you put multiple humans together is another dimension entirely.
Yes, you raise a really good point too! The best collaborators I've worked with, has pushed back on what I've said and we got rolling with coming up with how it should be together, they leverage their experience and creativity, and they're good at teasing out what the client (me) actually wants and can combine it all.
What if there is no potential of the game making any money ? I am sure if a musician wants to create cover art they will give AI image generator a first pass.
It again works like LLMs, you gotta try a few and see which one works out for your use cases and tasks, some are better at some things, others not. Also, both quality and style of communication differs a lot, worth trying to figure out if that basically matches first, then quickly move on if it doesn't.
Well, a coworker recently rigged up eleven's api to a coffee machine sensor. It now sings, loudly, an original composition to the effect of "make a new pot you asshole" whenever it gets low. We've gotten country, symphonic metal, southern hip hop, smooth british singing, accusatory broadway musical, 20's-style jazz singer, and more - it's different every time.
While the advisability of this particular project is up for debate, I do think it's something that could only exist with an API like eleven's.
> Are people asking for this to exist? There isn't a big enough pool of talented humans willing to work for low pay, that music needs to be made even cheaper and soullessly?
Hiring someone is work and takes effort, and can take a few tries. People, especially solo creators, generally don't want to bother, and are excited at what they can now do without requiring people to fill in skills they haven't acquired. This ironically goes for creatives as well!
I think it's been telling past week, when Astra demonstrated a step change in 3D modeling/art abilities. I have a few friends who are indie game devs, and who had been excited about AI because it allows them to create without requiring programmers all of a sudden. And they reacted with dismay to Astra - like what many programmers were feeling two years ago. But previously they had not quite been able to empathize and were in no way hiding their enthusiasm about making games without being handicapped by programmer inavailability.
This won't replace pop stars; those remain analog because they sell better. This is why South Korea for example went all-in on the idol system of kpop: South Korea had pervasive broadband before most other markets, so when MP3 came along physical album sales crashed over night. Music companies shifted to the most analog product they could think of: People. (I'm almost literally quoting J.Y. Park.)
It might well replace the session musician you hire to sing the demo tape that's delivered to those pop stars to model their performance on, though.
The moral debate also isn't entirely new to music production, with software emulations having replaced many physical instruments and having put plenty of instrument or gear makers out of work.
Counter-example: This is pre-AI, but I also have a friend who runs a very successful small company in a niche he's all but cornered. When he started he needed a programmer, and he found this almost-no-cost kid working from his parents' home in a small village in Argentina on a platform like Fiverr or something. It worked out so well he offered to make him a 50% partner, and now they're both incredibly well off and the kid, now in his 30s, is the richest man in his village. This could be you, but chances are you'll give the money to Sama or ElevenLabs because it's the path of least resistance.
Take a hard look at the people who are super into this stuff. Ignore the people who have a direct financial interest in it. Look at the people who are left, who are truly enthusiastic about AI-generated music as users.
In my experience they are inexplicably excited by how easy it is to make something shitty.
Not everyone is a born musician, just like not everyone is a born writer, sprinter or mountain climber. But it takes a certain kind of person to hit the "easy" button and still feel like they accomplished something.
Engineer on ElevenMusic (so discount accordingly). I like to think of the model as an instrument - something you can sit with for hours and get better at. The people who stick around the most treat it that way (they write their own lyrics, upload half finished songs as reference, bring their own voice back from old recordings etc..). For example my dad was in a band in the 80s and stopped writing music and it's fun to see him make it again.
Every time a barrier drops (samplers, synths, autotune, GarageBand, sample packs) this argument gets made and it is partly right. Plenty of what gets made on our platform is complete slop but if your only contribution to a song was a "make a pop song" prompt that's what you deserve. You are right that nobody was ever short of music - but many people are short of a way to make it so we build for them.
Ouch, yes. One time I commissioned a musician I had befriended to make a piano arrangement of a favorite song to be played at our wedding. The result was great, but it sure wasn't cheap, even if reasonable.
I'd still do this again however, because I really enjoyed the feeling of the community of people contributing our wedding and all the little stories attached. "I prompted ElevenLabs for this!" wouldn't be a memory; a fellow human spending some hours of their life on making this for us and what lead to it is.
I don't care about AI bands and wouldn't listen to the music by itself for pleasure, but for video game music? Or soundtracks to sub-AAA/hollywood productions that can't afford someone who's won an Oscar/Golden Globe? I don't see a problem with it, and I play an instrument (it's in my lap right now!) and am involved in my local music scene. Samples, VSTis and autotune already killed commercial music, and this isn't going to change anything for people who do it because they love it.
I think it's a bit unfair to draw the line here. Some of the most memorable music in my life has been from video games and I'd hate to lose the human touch here just as much as I'd hate to lose the human touch at live shows.
DOOM 2016, FTL, the Donkey Kong Country games, Mega Man and the Mega Man X series - and of course anything Koji Kondo's done - just to mention a few off the top of my head. I've never really been the type to listen to game music outside the context of a game (unless I've got a particularly bad earworm), but man, I do appreciate good game music.
I have a friend who came to me and said "i found a new french musician/singer that i really liked on <some platform>. Her voice is really good". and a day or two later he said "god dammit, it turned out to be AI"
So yes, there'll be demand, no people won't often know it.
Think of it as an extension of a dj . Instead of downloading the music , you refer , bend , and create your own . The quality of entire electronic music will balloon due to this .
I don't understand how something can "balloon" something like electronic music when it's a generator of mediocrity, it doesn't expand and "come up" with things, it uses what it knows to extract, condense and generalize patterns, it gets bland, and nothing so far I've heard been innovative and new.
But, I'm generally open minded to new things, and I won't claim I hold some absolute truths here, so if anyone heard anything generated that feels like it really pushes some horizon and actually innovates, creates something new or similar, please link it so I could hear it too and I promise I'll hear it with an open mind! :)
A lot of streaming platform listen minutes has always been this type of filler music. Until now, you could not really disambiguate intentional listening and filler listening. Now you can and the filler listeners wont even notice[1]. A huge chunk of the listen minutes whose value flowed to the artists (from a market perspective, technically this is inefficient), is now not going to go to them. Spotify will prompt optimise based on listening stats and perfect it. TBH until now, many artists were doing stream minutes optimisation of their pop music as well, this is kind of the logical conclusion of that. Human artists will have to stick to intentionally listened music, which is going to be a difficult competitive market. And most listeners actually don't care about this type of music to the same extent, measured in streaming minutes, so the market will be smaller as well. Popularity will end up mattering quite a bit more than it does today I suppose.
Example: This one is easily a replacement for people who listen to linkin park type music passively: https://elevenmusic.io/tracks/6aa1ca95740e34b282c33b0a Well except the vocal only pre-drop part, that was horrendous lyrical flow from the clanker.
this is for things like elevator and lobby music, background music for infomercials etc... it's simply not economically plausible to hire a person, plus it's a hassle, and royalty free libraries are a hassle to use.
Note that ElevenLabs claims the right to train on any data you upload to the service, such as editing a song you made etc.
> (d) License to Your Content and NILV. You hereby grant to ElevenLabs a license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, make available, communicate to the public, publicly perform, display, and use your Uploaded Music and Input (including your name, image, likeness, voice rights and other indicia of your persona that may be embodied in your Uploaded Music or Input (collectively, “NILV”)) and your Output, in each case, to provide the Services (including the trust and safety features therein), to promote and improve the Services, and to develop and improve our other services and products. Such license shall be…
Great sound quality, definitely better than Suno 5 and 6. It let me download a WAV file which goes unfiltered up to 20kHz (Suno goes to ~15kHz and has more artefacts).
They also seem to use a different encoding scheme which has more bandwidth and less artefacts up front. If you download a WAV from Suno, you still essentially have MP3 quality, just serialized to a WAV file. The elevenlabs WAV has full audio bandwidth instead and I checked frequency sections with a parametric EQ and noticed that e.g. the cymbals go high up in spectrum (which is not obvious in the given sample song where middle and bass frequencies dominate); with a bit of mastering the result is much better, but I posted the original here. I can also upload the WAV file if needed.
Gosh, the voice singing “unlimited downloads!” but the underlying text saying “400 per day” sure hit hard. As if generative AI needed more publicity for its “we are literally just making stuff up” approach to
getting stuff done.
I don't think this could be a model issue with not following properly (I hope for the sake of ElevenLabs), otherwise this would the most botched model release we've seen so far. Their main product release with a demo and not a single person listened to/read that demo and noticed the difference?!
Something must have happened here, miscommunication between departments so the blog post authors/owners and whoever made the actual music generation missed some update in-between when they made this and the release. If it's truly that the model chose not to follow passed lyrics/hallucination, and they still released this, I'd be lost for words.
It's interesting to see there are text differences between the audio and the blog post. At the point where it vocalizes unlimited downloads by Plus users, the text says 400. I wonder if that's hallucination or a post-music-generation edit.
Side note: a bit funny they launched ”Muse, a conversational co-writer for ElevenMusic” August 27[1] and Facebook launched ”Muse: The World’s First Personal AI Agent” September 8[2]
Then I got the music, which promises Unlimited lossless downloads for Pro tier, whereas the text says only 400 per month! Isn't this false advertising?
I'm an engineer on elevenmusic and we are working hard to restore availability (which has been sporadic over the last 10 minutes). We're working very hard behind the scenes to bring it back online.
I'll be much more interested when they combine this, ElevenReader, and their soundscapes, into audio dramas on-demand. I'd pay a good $20-30 per month for that.
Same here - the pieces exist & our music model can now do voice + sfx + music in a single generation (5 min limit so these were chained together to form longer pieces).
Currently not getting any kind of response on their UI when attempting to create something. No console messages or network requests are triggered when clicking the "Create" button.
Way, way worse than an utter waste of resources and ingenuity. Any musician using this is nothing in my eyes, unless it’s the weirdest, most subversive thing I’ve ever heard. Like maybe there are three or four actually creative uses for this, maybe, but all the rest of it will be a talentless void. Awful.
I chose to listen to the blog post instead of just reading it. I don't know how much if it is just the idea of AI-generated music for me, but the listening experience was extremely repulsive.
>ElevenLabs recently announced a multi-year strategic agreement with Universal Music Group (UMG) spanning licensing and product development. This agreement is separate from Music v2.5.
I am more interested in knowing what this will bring in the future. This is bigger than their 2.5 or whatever version.
I'm not against some AI uses, I use LLMs myself where it makes sense, but music is one of the things that we were told AI would free up all our time to do!!
Why not? The experience of working with a freelancer for a piece of creative art is more or less like prompting except they take longer to reply, understand better most of the time, write/spell worse, but produce way better results, especially after two/three iterations ("prompts").
It really depends on what you want/need, augment/extrapolate your own creativity with AI tools, or invite someone else's.
The AI debate is for now most often centered on whether AI is capable of replacing individuals, but replacing the results you get when you put multiple humans together is another dimension entirely.
While the advisability of this particular project is up for debate, I do think it's something that could only exist with an API like eleven's.
Hiring someone is work and takes effort, and can take a few tries. People, especially solo creators, generally don't want to bother, and are excited at what they can now do without requiring people to fill in skills they haven't acquired. This ironically goes for creatives as well!
I think it's been telling past week, when Astra demonstrated a step change in 3D modeling/art abilities. I have a few friends who are indie game devs, and who had been excited about AI because it allows them to create without requiring programmers all of a sudden. And they reacted with dismay to Astra - like what many programmers were feeling two years ago. But previously they had not quite been able to empathize and were in no way hiding their enthusiasm about making games without being handicapped by programmer inavailability.
This won't replace pop stars; those remain analog because they sell better. This is why South Korea for example went all-in on the idol system of kpop: South Korea had pervasive broadband before most other markets, so when MP3 came along physical album sales crashed over night. Music companies shifted to the most analog product they could think of: People. (I'm almost literally quoting J.Y. Park.)
It might well replace the session musician you hire to sing the demo tape that's delivered to those pop stars to model their performance on, though.
The moral debate also isn't entirely new to music production, with software emulations having replaced many physical instruments and having put plenty of instrument or gear makers out of work.
Counter-example: This is pre-AI, but I also have a friend who runs a very successful small company in a niche he's all but cornered. When he started he needed a programmer, and he found this almost-no-cost kid working from his parents' home in a small village in Argentina on a platform like Fiverr or something. It worked out so well he offered to make him a 50% partner, and now they're both incredibly well off and the kid, now in his 30s, is the richest man in his village. This could be you, but chances are you'll give the money to Sama or ElevenLabs because it's the path of least resistance.
In my experience they are inexplicably excited by how easy it is to make something shitty.
Not everyone is a born musician, just like not everyone is a born writer, sprinter or mountain climber. But it takes a certain kind of person to hit the "easy" button and still feel like they accomplished something.
Every time a barrier drops (samplers, synths, autotune, GarageBand, sample packs) this argument gets made and it is partly right. Plenty of what gets made on our platform is complete slop but if your only contribution to a song was a "make a pop song" prompt that's what you deserve. You are right that nobody was ever short of music - but many people are short of a way to make it so we build for them.
I'd still do this again however, because I really enjoyed the feeling of the community of people contributing our wedding and all the little stories attached. "I prompted ElevenLabs for this!" wouldn't be a memory; a fellow human spending some hours of their life on making this for us and what lead to it is.
There's often value in the provenance of things.
I think it's a bit unfair to draw the line here. Some of the most memorable music in my life has been from video games and I'd hate to lose the human touch here just as much as I'd hate to lose the human touch at live shows.
DOOM 2016, FTL, the Donkey Kong Country games, Mega Man and the Mega Man X series - and of course anything Koji Kondo's done - just to mention a few off the top of my head. I've never really been the type to listen to game music outside the context of a game (unless I've got a particularly bad earworm), but man, I do appreciate good game music.
So yes, there'll be demand, no people won't often know it.
https://melodysechochamber.bandcamp.com/track/some-time-alon... (not in French language)
https://endlessfloods.bandcamp.com/track/rites-futurs (French language)
But, I'm generally open minded to new things, and I won't claim I hold some absolute truths here, so if anyone heard anything generated that feels like it really pushes some horizon and actually innovates, creates something new or similar, please link it so I could hear it too and I promise I'll hear it with an open mind! :)
Example: This one is easily a replacement for people who listen to linkin park type music passively: https://elevenmusic.io/tracks/6aa1ca95740e34b282c33b0a Well except the vocal only pre-drop part, that was horrendous lyrical flow from the clanker.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EDM/comments/1mq3s5p/just_noticed_t...
> (d) License to Your Content and NILV. You hereby grant to ElevenLabs a license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, make available, communicate to the public, publicly perform, display, and use your Uploaded Music and Input (including your name, image, likeness, voice rights and other indicia of your persona that may be embodied in your Uploaded Music or Input (collectively, “NILV”)) and your Output, in each case, to provide the Services (including the trust and safety features therein), to promote and improve the Services, and to develop and improve our other services and products. Such license shall be…
Here is my first attempt: http://rochus-keller.ch/Diverses/Polyphonic_Threshold_1.mp3
And here are some Suno v5 tracks with the same prompt for comparison: https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1428
All in all, Suno still has much better musicality (or at least had in version 5), but the sound quality of elevenmusic is clearly better.
Cool presentation, but who signed off on this?
To be fair, there are technical considerations. Like, technically, nobody in charge of these companies gives a shit about misleading people.
Something must have happened here, miscommunication between departments so the blog post authors/owners and whoever made the actual music generation missed some update in-between when they made this and the release. If it's truly that the model chose not to follow passed lyrics/hallucination, and they still released this, I'd be lost for words.
Text: You have rights to what you make.
Music: You own what you make.
Naming is hard!
[1]https://elevenmusic.io/blog/introducing-muse [2]https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/introducing-muse-personal-...
Then I got the music, which promises Unlimited lossless downloads for Pro tier, whereas the text says only 400 per month! Isn't this false advertising?
I made some here with our last model: https://elevenmusic.io/artists/elevenmusic-spaces
It’s almost like dj but now you’re not just picking tracks of a similar theme , you choose a theme , and the rest of the music bands . Wow .
I am more interested in knowing what this will bring in the future. This is bigger than their 2.5 or whatever version.