AI music cost per finished minute, compared

Sume charges a fixed $0.125 per accepted music generation, whatever the prompt length. Per finished minute that depends on how long the track runs, which you steer in the prompt. A TeamDay roundup puts Lyria 3.5 at about $0.04 a minute, ElevenLabs Music v2.5 at $0.15 a minute and Suno Pro at $8 a month for 20 downloads, which works out to $0.40 a download.

The reported prices

These figures come from a TeamDay comparison read on 2026-10-03. They are the roundup's numbers, not measured here, and vendor prices change.

What Sume charges

The Sume Music 1.0 page states a fixed $0.125 per accepted generation, with no variation by prompt length or optional image conditioning. Music 1.0 is retiring gradually and every request resolves through the Music Router, where every model charges the fixed Music price per audio generation. New integrations call POST /v1/music-router/generate.

Music runs on Google Lyria 3.5, which the docs describe as full-length structured songs up to a few minutes. Length is steered by the prompt, for example "a 2-minute track" or section markers such as [0:00-0:30] Intro: .... The API rejects duration and duration_seconds, so a requested length is a direction, not a guaranteed setting.

The arithmetic, with a caveat

If a request for a 2-minute track really produces two minutes, $0.125 works out to about $0.0625 a minute. If it produces 30 seconds, the same fee is $0.25 a minute. Because length is not guaranteed, compare on the fee per accepted generation first and per minute second. Check the generated audio before you count it.

A request

The brief below follows the docs' seven-axis advice: emotion, genre, tempo, key, instruments, an arc with a named moment, and era.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/music-router/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: music-cost-check-001" \
  -d '{
    "model": "sume/music-auto",
    "prompt": "Warm lo-fi hip hop, 84 BPM, C minor. Dusty Rhodes chords, brushed boom-bap drums, a muted trumpet answer at 0:10. A 2-minute track. Instrumental, no vocals."
  }'