Every AI music tool on this page will tell you that paid plans come with “commercial use.” Almost none of them will promise to defend you if a record label disagrees. Those are two different things, and the gap between them is where a musician actually gets hurt.

So this ranking does something the usual roundup skips. Alongside sound quality and price, it reads each vendor’s own terms and reports what rights you really get. Suno’s terms, to pick the obvious example, assign you the copyright in your songs on a paid plan and then say in the next breath that Suno “makes no representation or warranty to you that any copyright will vest in any Output.” Both sentences are on the same page. Only one of them makes it into the marketing.

Nine tools made the list. Prices were checked on the month-to-month toggle in July 2026, not the annual rate vendors show by default. Where a vendor hides its pricing behind JavaScript or runs a promo instead of publishing a standing rate, this post says so rather than inventing a number.

Quick comparison

ToolReal monthly priceWho owns the outputBest for
SunoFree / Pro $8 / Premier $24Assigned to you on paid plans, with no copyright warrantyFull songs with vocals
UdioNot published in readable formNot verifiable from the vendor’s pageAudio fidelity, if you accept the unknowns
AIVAFree / Standard EUR 11 / Pro EUR 33 (annual display)AIVA on Free and Standard; you on ProCinematic and orchestral scoring
ElevenLabs MusicPro $99 / Scale $299 / Business $990Commercial use from Starter upMusic alongside voice work
SoundrawPromo pricing only, ends 31 JulyYou keep the licence after cancellingVideo creators who cancel and come back
MubertNot published in readable formLicence bars streaming release on every planBackground beds, nothing you release
Beatoven.aiFree / Creator $6 (unconfirmed)Royalty-free, artist-collaboration modelPodcasts and video underscore
BoomyNot published in readable formDistribution model, terms not fetchableBeginners making a first track
Stable AudioNot published in readable formNot verifiable from the vendor’s pageSound design and samples

The licensing question, answered honestly

Start with the litigation, because it sets the backdrop for everything below.

On 24 June 2024, record companies filed copyright infringement cases against Suno in federal court in Boston and against Udio in federal court in New York, coordinated by the RIAA. The complaints allege unlicensed copying of sound recordings at scale, and say that certain prompt patterns push the models into producing output with melodic and vocal similarities to well-known recordings. They seek declarations of infringement, injunctions and damages. That is the filing, and the filing is as far as this post will go: the current posture of either case is not something we can confirm from a primary source we are permitted to read, so we are not going to characterise it. Anyone telling you these cases are “settled” or “won” should be asked which docket they read. The RIAA’s announcement and the filed complaints are public.

Now the part that affects your bank account.

“Commercial use” means the vendor grants you a licence to use what you made. Indemnification means the vendor promises to defend you and pay the damages if someone sues over it. Nearly every tool here grants the first. Not one of the nine grants the second to an ordinary paying subscriber. That asymmetry is the single most important fact in this category, and it is why “royalty-free” on a pricing page should not be read as “safe.”

Suno’s terms are worth quoting because they are unusually candid. The service disclaims any warranty “that Your Use of Any Output or Voice Model Will Not Infringe the Rights of Any Third Party.” The indemnity clause runs the other direction from what you might hope: you agree to defend and indemnify Suno, not the reverse. Read that twice if you are planning to put an AI-generated track behind a client’s advertisement.

None of this means the tools are unusable. It means the risk sits with you, and you should price that in.

Full song generators

1. Suno

$8 a month buys the most capable general-purpose music model available to a consumer right now. That is the verdict, and the rest is detail.

Suno’s pricing page defaults to monthly, which makes it one of the few vendors in this roundup not quietly showing you an annual rate. Free gives you 50 credits that renew daily and carries, in Suno’s own words, “No commercial use.” Pro is $8 a month for 2,500 credits. Premier is $24 for 10,000. Both paid tiers say “Commercial use rights for new songs made” – note the word new, which means anything you generated on the free plan does not retroactively become commercial when you upgrade.

What it does well: structure. Suno writes songs that have verses, choruses and endings, which sounds like a low bar until you hear competitors produce two minutes of pleasant material that never resolves. Vocals are the headline feature and they are convincing enough that the uncanny quality now shows up mostly in consonants and breath rather than pitch.

What it does badly: it is repetitive across generations. Ask for the same genre ten times and you will hear the same three chord movements. Fine control is still weak, so if you have a specific arrangement in your head, you will fight the prompt box rather than describe your way to it. And the copyright position described above is genuinely unresolved, which for a working musician is not an abstraction.

Best for: songwriters producing demos, and anyone who needs a finished vocal track this afternoon. suno.com

2. Udio

Udio has a reputation for the best raw audio fidelity in the category, and on listening tests that reputation holds up. The high end is cleaner than Suno’s and the stereo image is wider.

Here is the problem with recommending it. Udio’s pricing page returns a page title and nothing else to an ordinary fetch. Every price is rendered by JavaScript after load, so the plan names, the monthly rates and the credit allowances are not present in what the server sends. Search results confidently list a Standard tier at $10 and a Pro tier at $30, but every one of those results is an aggregator blog, and this category is thick with aggregators that copy each other’s numbers and then go stale together. We are not printing a figure we could not read on Udio’s own page.

The same opacity applies to its licensing terms, which matters more than usual given Udio is one of the two named defendants in the June 2024 filings. If you are evaluating Udio for commercial work, open the pricing page in a browser, read the terms yourself, and screenshot what you agreed to.

Best for: producers who care about fidelity above all and are willing to do their own diligence. udio.com

3. Boomy

Boomy’s pitch has always been speed for people who have never made music. You pick a style, it produces a track, you nudge it. A first song takes under a minute.

Boomy is alive – worth stating plainly, because expired products in this category keep returning HTTP 200 from parking stubs and getting listed as live in script-written roundups. Boomy is not that. The page loads Stripe and Google reCAPTCHA, which parked domains do not do. But it is a single-page app that ships an empty HTML shell, so its plans, prices and terms are not readable without a browser session, and this post will not guess at them.

The honest caution on Boomy is musical rather than legal. Output is thin and loop-driven, and its distribution feature – which pushes your tracks to streaming platforms and splits royalties – has historically been the thing that gets Boomy users into trouble when platforms flag AI-generated uploads. Streaming services have grown less tolerant of bulk AI uploads, not more.

Best for: absolute beginners making something for fun. Not for anyone building a catalogue. boomy.com

Instrumental and background music

4. AIVA

AIVA has the clearest licensing ladder of any tool here, and it is clear in a way that should worry you until you read to the top rung.

On the Free plan, AIVA’s own pricing page says “Copyright owned by AIVA” and “No monetization.” On Standard, at EUR 11 a month, it still says “Copyright owned by AIVA,” with monetisation limited to YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram. Only on Pro, at EUR 33 a month, does it say “Copyright owned by YOU,” with full monetisation. Most roundups list AIVA’s cheap tier and never mention that you do not own what you make on it.

One caveat on those figures: AIVA’s page displays annual rates for the paid tiers and does not expose a month-to-month price, so EUR 11 and EUR 33 are what you pay per month on an annual commitment, not what you would pay to subscribe for a single month. Prices are in euros, not dollars.

Musically, AIVA is the strongest orchestral and cinematic engine in this list, and it is the only one that feels built by people who have read a score. It exports MIDI, which means you can take its output into a DAW and rewrite it rather than accepting a rendered mix. That single feature makes it the pick for composers.

Weak on anything with a beat. Ask AIVA for hip-hop and you get something that sounds like an orchestra was told what hip-hop is over the phone.

Best for: film, game and trailer composers who want editable MIDI. aiva.ai

5. ElevenLabs Music

ElevenLabs built the best voice synthesis on the market and then pointed the same infrastructure at music. The result is the most interesting new entrant in the category, mostly because it is the only one where music and voice live in one account.

Pricing needs a warning label. ElevenLabs lists Pro at $99 a month, Scale at $299 and Business at $990, and those are stable figures. The Starter and Creator tiers are a different matter: the page advertises “First month 50% off” and displays the discounted number where the standing rate should be, which is precisely the trap that puts wrong prices into every roundup in this category. We are not quoting a Starter or Creator monthly rate for that reason. Check it yourself at signup, and check what it renews at.

On rights, ElevenLabs lists “Music commercial use” as a Starter-tier benefit, so commercial rights start low in the stack. Music generation is metered at 900 credits per minute, which burns a small plan’s allowance faster than you expect.

The catch: it is a generalist audio platform, not a music specialist, and it shows in arrangement. Tracks are competent and slightly anonymous. If you need a song with a point of view, this is not it. If you need a bed under a narrated video you already made in the same account, it is excellent.

Best for: podcasters and video producers already paying ElevenLabs for voice. See our roundup of AI video generators for the other half of that workflow. elevenlabs.io

6. Soundraw

Soundraw makes the most generous licensing promise in this roundup, and unlike most such promises it is written down.

The page states that “Anything you make while you’re subscribed stays licensed for life, even if you cancel later,” and that “anything you’ve already exported remains covered forever.” It also says you “keep 100% of the revenue – no copyright claims, ever.” For a freelancer who needs music for three projects a year, a licence that survives cancellation changes the maths completely: subscribe for a month, export what you need, cancel, keep the rights.

The prices on the page right now are Creator $5.99, Artist Starter $10.49, Artist Pro $12.59 and Artist Unlimited $17.49 per month. Do not take those as the standing rate. The page carries a “Limited Time Offer – Ends July 31” banner and warns the campaign “may end earlier than scheduled,” and Soundraw does not display a regular month-to-month price next to the promotional one. What you see today is a sale.

The editor is Soundraw’s real advantage: you generate a track and then adjust energy, instrumentation and length on a timeline rather than re-rolling a prompt and hoping. Video editors find this immediately obvious and songwriters find it limiting, which tells you exactly who it is for. No vocals.

Best for: video creators and anyone who wants a licence that outlives the subscription. soundraw.io

7. Mubert

Read Mubert’s licence before you read anything else about it, because the licence disqualifies it for most of the things people want to use it for.

Mubert’s pricing page states that “On all plans, tracks are not licensed for Content ID, standalone release on streaming platforms, or stock music sites.” Every plan. There is no tier you can buy your way up to that lifts it. If your plan was to generate tracks and put them on Spotify, Mubert is not the tool, and the site footer is equally blunt: music on Mubert domains is “licensed by Mubert Inc only for personal use. All rights are reserved. Public reproduction, recording, distribution of this music is prohibited.”

Its actual plan names and monthly prices are rendered client-side and not present in the page source, so they are not quoted here. The page does confirm a monthly/annual toggle exists and that “Each download includes a license certificate for your plan,” which is a genuinely useful artifact if a platform ever queries your upload.

Where Mubert earns its place is the streaming API. It generates continuous, non-repeating music in real time, which makes it the sensible choice for an app, a game, a shop or a livestream that needs music that never ends and never loops audibly.

Best for: developers embedding endless background audio. Not for release. mubert.com

8. Beatoven.ai

Beatoven is the one tool here that markets its training data as a feature. The company describes its mission as making “original, royalty-free background music accessible to content creators worldwide through ethical AI technology and artist collaborations.” Artists are compensated for their contribution to the models. Whether that fully insulates you is a question nobody can answer yet, but it is a materially different posture from training on whatever was reachable.

Pricing comes with a caveat. Beatoven’s /pricing URL returns a 404, and the only figures readable from the site are in its own structured data: a free tier with 5 generations, and a Creator plan at $6 a month with 15 minutes of downloads. Structured-data markup goes stale more often than pricing pages do, so treat the $6 as a lead rather than a fact and confirm at checkout.

Musically it is built for underscore: mood-driven, deliberately unobtrusive, designed to sit beneath a voice. Which is also the limitation. Nothing Beatoven makes will ever be the thing anyone listens to on purpose.

Best for: podcasters who want music with a defensible provenance story. beatoven.ai

9. Stable Audio

Stability AI’s audio product is the sound-design pick. It is better at a 12-second riser, a texture or a percussion loop than at a three-minute song, and it does not pretend otherwise.

Stable Audio’s site is a Next.js application that ships no readable content to a plain fetch, pricing page included, so no plan or figure is quoted here. What can be said from the product itself: it generates high-quality short-form audio, it is the natural fit if you are producing samples to chop rather than finished tracks, and Stability’s licensing history has been more permissive than the industry norm.

Its weakness is the flip side of its strength. Ask for a full song and you get something that starts well and loses the thread by the second minute.

Best for: sound designers and producers building sample libraries. stableaudio.com

What didn’t make the cut

The previous version of this article ranked 15 tools. Six are gone, and the reasons are instructive.

  • Amper Music – absorbed into Shutterstock years ago and no longer exists as a product you can sign up for. It survives in roundups because nobody checks.
  • Meta AudioCraft – a research release, not a service. It belongs in an article about running models locally, not in a buyer’s guide.
  • Google MusicFX – lives inside an experimental sandbox with no commercial licence and no support commitment. Fun. Not a tool you build a business on.
  • Riffusion – the original was a spectrogram novelty. The name now attaches to a different product, and conflating the two is how stale roundups mislead people.
  • LALAL.AI – genuinely good, but it separates stems from existing recordings. It does not generate music. It was never in this category.
  • Loudly and Ecrett Music – both alive, both competent, both comprehensively beaten by Soundraw on the editor and by Beatoven on provenance. Fewer, better entries beats a longer list.

One note on this site’s own coverage: we have two older, thinner posts on AI music that overlap this one. This is the article we are keeping current. If you landed on a shorter version of this list elsewhere on the site, this page supersedes it.

How to choose

Work backwards from what you are going to do with the file.

Releasing it on streaming platforms? Suno or Udio, and go in with your eyes open about the litigation and the fact that neither will defend you. Mubert is expressly off the table. AIVA works only on Pro, where the copyright is actually yours.

Putting it under a video? Soundraw, for the editor and the licence that survives cancellation. ElevenLabs if you are already in that account for voiceover.

Scoring a film or a game? AIVA Pro. The MIDI export is the whole argument – it is the only tool here that hands you something you can rewrite rather than something you have to accept.

Building software? Mubert’s API, within its personal-use and no-release limits.

Doing client work? Read the indemnity clause before you read the price. Then consider whether a human composer or a traditional licensed library is the cheaper insurance policy. For a lot of commercial jobs in 2026, it still is.

If AI music is one piece of a wider toolkit, our guides to AI image generators, AI writing assistants and AI tools for YouTube creators cover the neighbouring categories with the same scepticism.

Frequently asked questions

Can I legally sell music made with AI?

You can sell it in the sense that every paid tool here grants you commercial-use rights. Whether you own a copyright in it is a separate question, and Suno’s terms say plainly that no copyright is warranted to vest in the output. Selling something you may not own a copyright in is legal; it means you may have no standing to stop anyone else from using the same track.

Will any of these companies defend me if I get sued?

No. None of the nine offers indemnification to an ordinary subscriber. Suno’s terms go further and require you to indemnify Suno. If you need contractual protection, this category does not currently sell it at consumer prices.

What happened with the Suno and Udio lawsuits?

Record companies filed copyright cases against Suno in Boston and Udio in New York on 24 June 2024, alleging large-scale unlicensed copying of sound recordings and seeking injunctions and damages. We are not stating where those cases stand today, because we cannot verify the current posture from a primary source we are permitted to access. Treat any confident claim about the outcome with suspicion unless it cites the docket.

Which AI music generator is best for vocals?

Suno. It is the only tool on this list producing vocal performances that survive a listen on decent headphones, and at $8 a month it is also the cheapest way to get them.

Does “royalty-free” mean the music is safe to use?

It means you do not owe the vendor ongoing royalties. It says nothing about whether a third party might claim the output infringes their rights. Those are unrelated ideas that marketing copy deliberately blurs.

Can I put AI music on Spotify?

Technically yes with Suno, Udio, Soundraw or AIVA Pro. Not with Mubert, whose licence bars standalone release on streaming platforms on every plan. Bear in mind that streaming platforms have been tightening their own rules on bulk AI uploads independently of what your generator’s licence permits.

Is there a genuinely free AI music generator?

Suno’s free tier gives 50 credits daily but explicitly forbids commercial use. AIVA’s free tier works but the copyright stays with AIVA. Beatoven offers 5 free generations. For anything you intend to monetise, the free tiers are auditions, not solutions.

Why does this article refuse to list some prices?

Because several vendors here render prices in JavaScript or display a promotional rate where the standing rate belongs. Roundups that quote a number for every tool are frequently copying each other rather than reading the vendor’s page. A missing figure with a stated reason is more useful than a confident wrong one.

Should I use AI music for paid client work?

Only if your client understands the position and it is written into your contract. The risk does not sit with the vendor, and if you have not said anything, your client will assume it sits with you.

The short version

Suno at $8 is the best value in the category and the most legally exposed. AIVA Pro at EUR 33 is the only tool that clearly gives you the copyright and editable MIDI. Soundraw’s licence outlives your subscription, which no one else offers. Mubert cannot be released. Everyone else is a specialist.

The tools got good faster than the law got clear. That is the actual state of AI music in 2026, and any article that tells you otherwise has not read the terms.