ElevenLabs, the voice AI company valued at around $11 billion after a $500 million funding round in February, released Music v2 this week. It is the company's second music generation model, arriving about ten months after the first.
The headline feature is section-by-section composition. Instead of generating a single audio clip and hoping it works, you can build an intro, then a verse, then a chorus separately, and stitch them together into a complete track. You can also go back and regenerate just the bridge, or just the second verse, without touching the rest of the song. This is a workflow that professional music editors will recognize. It is far closer to how actual music gets made.
The model can also shift between musical styles within a single track, and it handles vocals across multiple languages more reliably than its predecessor. For businesses producing content for global audiences, that last part is not a minor detail.
The more important story, though, is the legal one. ElevenLabs has signed licensing deals with Believe, Kobalt, and Merlin. Every track the model generates is cleared for commercial use, with no sync fees and no clearance delays. You can use what you create in an ad, a product video, a customer app, or a brand campaign without additional legal review.
That matters because the alternative is messy right now. Suno and Udio, the two most widely used AI music tools, are currently fighting active copyright lawsuits from Sony Music in US federal courts. Warner Music and Universal Music Group reached separate settlements with each company in late 2025, but Sony is still litigating. A court ruling expected in summer 2026 could significantly change how those tools operate or limit what users can do with the music they generate.
The legal pattern is clear: courts have consistently ruled against AI companies that trained their models on data scraped without permission, and they have been more open to arguments from companies that used legitimately licensed material. ElevenLabs is on the right side of that line, which is increasingly a business advantage, not just an ethical one.
Pricing dropped alongside the launch. API access to generate music programmatically came down by up to 50%, and the self-serve creative tool for brand teams dropped by up to 40%. ElevenLabs is clearly trying to grow volume, not just announce a capability.
The tool is available now through two products: ElevenMusic, aimed at individual creators, and ElevenCreative, built for marketing and brand teams. Developer access through the API is coming soon.
For businesses spending money on stock music subscriptions, paying per-track licensing fees, or waiting weeks for a composer to deliver something, the value case is straightforward. Custom music, built around a specific brief, delivered in minutes, already cleared to use commercially. The only real question is whether the output quality is good enough for your use case, and that is something you can test directly.