Epidemic Sound for ads: Pro plan rule vs a $0.125 AI bed on Sume

If the track will sit under a paid ad, the Epidemic Sound plan you hold decides whether you may use it. Epidemic's own pricing page says you can use its music and sound effects for ad campaigns only on a Pro or Enterprise plan, and the page does not attach that line to the other tiers. A generated bed on Sume works differently: you pay a fixed $0.125 per accepted music generation, and the price does not change with the prompt or the length of the track.

Those are two different purchases. A library plan sells a right to use many existing tracks. A Music Router job sells one new file. This post lays the two side by side so you can pick by the question you actually have, which is usually either "may I run this in an ad?" or "what does the thirtieth variant cost?".

What the Epidemic page says (read 2026-10-05)

I read Epidemic Sound's pricing page today. It names four plan tiers: Creator, Pro, Business and Enterprise. It states that all plans include unlimited downloads and usage, copyright protection and plugins, and that you can use its music and sound effects for ad campaigns if you choose a Pro or Enterprise plan. The page text I could read did not show dollar amounts, because the plan comparison loads interactively. So this post does not quote an Epidemic price. Check the live comparison before you budget.

What the Sume docs do and do not say

The Music Router page says every router model charges the fixed Music price, and the Music 1.0 page puts it at $0.125 for each accepted generation, independent of prompt length or optional image conditioning. Music runs on Google Lyria 3.5 today. Neither page publishes a license statement for generated audio, so the right-to-use question for an ad is yours to settle with Sume before you spend media money. The same goes for any library file you import.

• Sume docs list the price and the engine, not usage rights.
• Google's own pricing page lists Lyria 3.5 at $0.08 per song (read 2026-10-05); Sume's $0.125 is a separate, fixed price on its own surface.
• A library track and a generated track both end up as a Sume-hosted audio URL once they are in your workspace.

Using either one in a render

Timeline 1.0 takes an optional soundtrack with url, gain_db, loop, fade_out_seconds (up to 10) and duck_db (0 to 20, which needs a real audio spine, not silence). Every URL must already be a media.sume.com artifact or asset, so a downloaded library file goes through POST /v1/media-imports first, while a Music Router result is already hosted. The render itself is $0.10 per started output minute (read 2026-10-05, from the Timeline page).

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: ad-bed-epidemic-compare-001" \
  -d '{
      "model": "sume/music-auto",
      "prompt": "Confident mid-tempo electronic pop underscore for a 30-second product ad, 108 BPM, A minor. Plucked synth, tight kick and clap, a short riser at 0:24 into a clean final hit. Instrumental, no vocals. A 30-second track."
    }'

A simple decision rule

Choose by what will change. If you run one ad for months and want a known, human-composed track that your plan already clears, the library plan fits. If you need one bed per variant, new each time, with the cost visible per job, generate. Many teams do both: a library track for the hero spot, generated beds for the long tail of cutdowns. Whichever you use, log the source of each track beside the ad, because that is the record someone will ask for when a platform queries it.