ElevenLabs Music vs SOUNDRAW: pricing, features and which to choose

ElevenLabs Music is ElevenLabs’ text-to-music service, launched on August 5, 2025. The company markets it to businesses, creators, artists, and developers, with generation available through its website and API. The service produces complete songs from natural-language prompts and supports vocals, instrumentals, genre, style, mood, and structure controls. ElevenLabs says the product was created with artists, labels, and publishers. The company’s current Music page also places the service inside ElevenCreative and presents a separate ElevenMusic experience for listening, remixing, and track creation. ElevenLabs Music is a product line inside ElevenLabs, so it has no separate founding year, headcount or funding figures. The launch announcement positioned the product for video, games, podcasts, and advertising, with access through the ElevenLabs interface and an API. Commercial permissions depend on the product and subscription terms.

A typical workflow starts with a text prompt describing a song’s genre, mood, instruments, vocals, language, and structure. Users can create a composition plan, edit lyrics or sound in individual sections, and regenerate a selected passage with inpainting. Music v2 and v2.5 support Audio Reference, which accepts a short uploaded track to guide production style, instrumentation, tempo, mood, and overall sound. The upload is screened for copyright compliance and is not used as a remix source. Generated music can run from 3 seconds to 5 minutes. The service supports multilingual vocals, including English, Spanish, German, and Japanese, plus MP3 and WAV output. The documentation also supports instrumental generation and explicit lyrics. A composition plan gives the user section-level control instead of requiring a single description to carry every musical instruction.

Buyers should distinguish ElevenMusic's download allowances from ElevenCreative's shared credits. The company says permissions attached to an existing ElevenMusic track survive a subsequent cancellation or downgrade, which matters for ongoing publications. The main limitation is licensing complexity. The Music terms impose plan, download, streaming, attribution, media, and eligibility restrictions, and users must review output before publishing or distributing it. Prompts cannot name real artists, songwriters, song titles, albums, publishers, or record labels, and users cannot use output to build a public music library without written authorization. Suno and Udio overlap on prompted song generation, while Stable Audio overlaps on generated audio for creator workflows. ElevenLabs Music suits teams that need multilingual vocals, section editing, Audio Reference, and API generation. It is a poor fit for buyers seeking self-hosting or unrestricted reuse of every generated track.

SOUNDRAW is a Japanese AI music company founded in 2020 by Daigo Kusunoki. It makes instrumental music that users shape through genre, mood, theme, tempo, length, instruments, and song structure controls. Music Business Worldwide reported a $3 million funding round in March 2024, led by Carbide Ventures with participation from investors including Eminem manager Paul Rosenberg. The company says its model is trained on input from its in-house music team rather than scraped catalogues. That rights-first positioning is central to the product: SOUNDRAW sells a usage license for generated recordings instead of presenting the service as a conventional stock-music library or a tool for cloning named artists.

A typical workflow starts with selecting a genre, mood, theme, and track length, after which SOUNDRAW generates candidate compositions. Users can alter sections, transitions, intensity, tempo, instruments, and arrangement, then download the result for a project. Creator is aimed at background music, while Artist plans let producers work with beats as the basis for songs. Artist Pro and Artist Unlimited add WAV and stem downloads, which makes the service more useful in a DAW than an MP3-only library. The company also offers an API for video platforms, games, apps, marketing tools, and creator software. Its API supports generation and customization, with documented asynchronous generation and endpoints for composing, customizing, and making similar tracks.

SOUNDRAW is strongest when a creator needs a usable instrumental quickly and wants to fit its arrangement to video timing. It is less suitable for a composer seeking detailed MIDI-level authorship, a permanent free tier, or permission to register generated audio with Content ID. Its license also restricts distributing an unmodified beat and limits downloaded tracks used for meditation, lo-fi, and relaxation content to the period of an active subscription. Suno is a closer choice for full vocal songs from prompts, while AIVA offers more composition-oriented control and licensing options; Beatoven.ai is another direct background-score alternative. Pick SOUNDRAW for commercial video music, adjustable beats, and a clearly priced path from MP3 downloads to stems, especially if avoiding scraped training data is a priority.