AI Music Rights After the Label Deals: What Creators Can Publish

Many creators assumed the 2025 settlements between the major labels and the AI music apps would make AI music safe to publish. They didn't. They made the rules stricter, split them by plan, and left several lawsuits open. If you put AI music in videos, podcasts or releases, the question is no longer "can the tool make it?" but "which plan was I on when I downloaded it, and where am I allowed to put it?" This is the state of play as of September 2026. It is not legal advice: for anything with real money attached, read the terms and talk to a lawyer.

The short version

• Suno now caps downloads on every plan. Only paid-plan downloads can be used commercially, and the labels filed a new lawsuit on 18 September.
• Udio has not allowed downloads since October 2025. Nothing you make there can be published outside the app.
• ElevenLabs' Eleven Music is commercial from its cheapest paid plan, with carve-outs for film, TV, radio and games, and streaming rights from the Creator plan.
• Instrumental "royalty-free" generators (Stable Audio, Soundraw, Mubert, Beatoven, AIVA) have clearer licences but very different limits on streaming, ownership and what happens after you cancel.
• YouTube lists AI-generated music among its examples of content to disclose. Spotify requires no label but bans unauthorised voice clones and spam.

Suno: v6, download caps and a second lawsuit

Suno Freemium

Full songs with vocals from a prompt, now on licensed v6 models with download caps

Free plan, paid from $8/mo

🔥 Annual billing saves 20% on Pro and Premier

8.4 Visit ↗

Suno settled with Warner Music Group in November 2025. The WMG announcement said downloads would require a paid account with monthly limits, and that Suno would build new models on licensed music. Both have now happened.

Download caps began on 3 September 2026. Suno's policy post sets the limits: free accounts get up to 7 lifetime trial downloads, Pro gets 20 a month and Premier 60 a month. The post says Suno Studio users keep unlimited downloads. Free trial downloads are for personal use only. In Suno's words, commercial rights apply to "songs downloaded on paid plans."

The terms now tie commercial use to a download. Suno's terms say you may not commercially exploit output that you have not downloaded through an approved channel. Suno also reserves the right to add a fingerprint, watermark or metadata showing the tier a song was made on and whether it was a permitted download. In practice, every song you release uses up one of your monthly downloads. A distributor or platform may also be able to tell which plan the file came from.

Ownership still depends on the plan. On paid plans, Suno's terms assign its rights in your outputs to you. On the free plan, you agree to use outputs only for lawful, personal, non-commercial purposes. Rights attach to the plan you were on at the time, so subscribing later does not turn old free-plan songs into commercial ones. At the time of writing, Pro costs $8 a month and Premier $24.

v6 arrived on 9 September 2026. Suno says it was developed with industry partners including Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe. v6 and v6-wild are for paid plans, and v6-mini is for everyone.

The labels are suing again. On 18 September 2026, Universal Music Group and Sony Music filed a second copyright lawsuit against Suno, this time aimed at the new model. Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety all reported it. Music Business Worldwide reported that Suno said v6 was trained partly on users' own creations. Nothing in the suit changes your Suno licence today. It does mean the legal status of the model behind your songs is being contested again, and a court could change the terms again.

What this means: Suno is still the most complete tool for songs with vocals. Treat each paid download as a publishing slot. Keep a record of which plan each track was downloaded on, and don't build a catalogue on free-plan songs.

Udio: the walled garden

Udio settled with UMG in October 2025 and with Warner in November 2025. It later signed deals with Merlin and Kobalt. As part of the UMG settlement it switched off downloads on 30 October 2025. Users were given a short window to save their songs, and the reaction was angry. Sony is still suing.

As of September 2026, Udio still lets you generate and share songs inside the app, but you cannot download audio, video or stems on any plan. In May 2026, trade press reported details of Udio's licensed app, called Starstruck. Our research this week found no launch, and no published download or rights terms for it.

What this means: you can't publish anything from Udio. Paid plans with "commercial rights" don't help while you can't export the file. Wait for the relaunch terms before you plan any work around it.

ElevenLabs Eleven Music: clean terms, with carve-outs

Eleven Music v2.5 🧠 ModelFreemium

ElevenLabs' music model: songs up to 5 minutes with vocals, cleared for most uses

ElevenLabs · 2026-09

7.9 Visit ↗

ElevenLabs' music model works inside the same credit plans as its voice tools. On 10 September 2026 ElevenLabs announced a multi-year strategic agreement with Universal Music Group. The rights are set out plan by plan in its Eleven Music terms:

• Free: personal use only.
• Starter ($6/month) and up: commercial use is allowed online and offline, except in film, TV, radio and studio games.
• Streaming rights, meaning distribution to music services, start at the Creator plan ($22/month).
• Enterprise Music: all online and offline commercial uses, with no carve-outs.

What this means: Eleven Music suits YouTube beds, ads and podcasts on any paid plan. If you want to release songs on streaming services, you need Creator or above. For film, TV, radio or game work, you need an Enterprise agreement.

Royalty-free instrumental generators

These tools make background music, not hit singles. Their selling point is a licence you can read. The details still differ in ways that matter.

Stable Audio Freemium

Stability AI's instrumental music and sound-effect generator trained on licensed audio

Free plan, paid from $11.99/mo

7.4 Visit ↗

• Stable Audio (Stability AI) makes instrumentals and sound effects only. Stability says the 2.x models were trained on the licensed AudioSparx catalogue. Paid plans include commercial rights. The open Stable Audio 3.0 weights are free for organisations under $1M in annual revenue.
• Soundraw says its model is trained only on music by its in-house producers. The Creator plan covers commercial use as background music. The Artist plans allow distribution to Spotify, Apple Music and TikTok, and you keep the royalties. Check which plan covers releases before you distribute.
• Mubert allows commercial use only from its Pro plan ($32.49 a month, billed yearly). Its terms ban selling tracks or publishing them on streaming services. If you cancel, you can't use earlier tracks in new projects. That makes it closer to renting music than owning it.
• Beatoven.ai says its Maestro model was trained with licensed partners and pays artists through attribution tracking. Paid plans come with what it calls an exclusive licence for commercial use. We could not read its pricing page this week.

AIVA Freemium

AI composer for instrumental soundtracks in 250+ styles, with MIDI export

Free plan, paid from $17/mo

🔥 Annual billing: Standard €11/month instead of about €15

7.0 Visit ↗

• AIVA has the clearest ownership split we've seen. On Free you must credit AIVA, and it owns the copyright. On Standard you can monetise on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram, but AIVA still owns the copyright. Only Pro (€33 a month, billed yearly) gives you the copyright, and that is the plan you need to sell or distribute music.

Two other routes are worth knowing. Lyria 3.5 from Google makes full songs with vocals and puts a SynthID watermark on everything. We found no specific commercial terms for songs made in the Gemini app. ACE-Step 1.5 is an MIT-licensed open model that runs locally. The licence covers the software, not what you do with it.

What platforms ask of you

The tool's licence says whether you may publish. Platform rules say how. Our disclosure guide covers each platform in full. For music:

YouTube asks creators to disclose realistic altered or synthetic content in YouTube Studio when uploading. Its help page puts "AI generated music" first in its list of examples that need disclosure. YouTube says disclosure does not limit a video's reach or its eligibility to earn money. Separately, the Partner Programme's "inauthentic content" policy excludes mass-produced, templated content that adds no original value. That rule is aimed squarely at channels that upload generated music in bulk.

Spotify has no general duty to label AI music. Its rules are about misuse:

• Vocal impersonation of a real artist is allowed only with that artist's authorisation.
• A spam filter targets mass uploads, duplicates, SEO tricks and very short tracks. Spotify said it removed more than 75 million spam tracks in one year.
• You can disclose AI use through your distributor using the DDEX AI-credits standard. Spotify says disclosure does not down-rank a track.

In the EU, the transparency duties in Article 50 of the AI Act have applied since 2 August 2026. They fall mainly on providers and on deployers of deepfakes, but they are why more tools now watermark or tag their output.

Can you own an AI song at all?

A tool can assign you its rights, but that doesn't mean the song is protected by copyright. In January 2025 the US Copyright Office concluded that AI outputs can be protected only where a human author has determined enough of the expressive elements. It also said prompts alone are not enough. Lyrics you wrote, a melody you played in, and real arranging and editing all help. A song generated from a one-line prompt may be something you can use but can't stop others copying. Our rights hub explains how this varies by format.

Publish-safely checklist

1. Know your plan at the moment of download. Screenshot or log it. On Suno this decides commercial rights. On AIVA it decides copyright.
2. Spend downloads only on songs you will publish (Suno Pro gives you 20 a month).
3. Match the licence to the destination: YouTube bed, podcast, paid ad, streaming release, film or TV, game. Eleven Music, Soundraw, Mubert and AIVA each draw these lines differently.
4. Don't use Udio for anything that must leave the app until its relaunch terms are published.
5. Never clone a real singer's voice or name an artist in a prompt for a track you plan to release. Spotify removes unauthorised impersonation.
6. Write or edit something yourself (lyrics, melody, arrangement) if you want a copyright claim you can defend.
7. Disclose AI music on YouTube with the altered or synthetic content setting, and add DDEX AI credits through your distributor for streaming releases.
8. Keep the original files and receipts: the downloaded file, the plan invoice and any licence certificate (Mubert issues them). They are your evidence if a Content ID or distributor claim arrives.
9. Recheck the terms each quarter. Suno's changed in September 2026 and could change again as the new lawsuit proceeds.

Browse every music tool with its licence summary on our music format page.

Read the official docs for…

• Suno's commercial-use, ownership and fingerprinting clauses: Suno Terms of Service
• Suno's download limits by plan from 3 September 2026: Updates to Downloads Policy and Terms of Service
• Eleven Music commercial and streaming rights by plan: Eleven Music model-specific terms
• YouTube's disclosure rules and examples: Disclosing altered or synthetic content
• Spotify's impersonation, spam and AI-credit rules: Spotify strengthens AI protections
• The US position on copyright in AI outputs: Copyright Office AI report, Part 2