Lyria 3.5 music: $0.125 a track on Sume vs $0.08 a song at Google

Lyria 3.5 costs $0.125 per generation on Sume's Music Router and $0.08 per song on Google's Gemini API, so 200 holiday ad beds cost $26.00 on Sume against $16.00 direct, a gap of $10.00. Sume's price is fixed at $0.125 and bills as $0.13 per accepted job.

Music is small money either way. The question for a Q4 buyer is whether the shared job lifecycle and one balance are worth about $0.05 per track, and for most pipelines that also render video and voice, they are.

The two price lines

Google's Gemini API pricing page lists Lyria 3.5 at $0.08 per song, Lyria 3 Pro Preview at $0.08 per song for full length, and a Lyria 3 Clip Preview at $0.04 for 30 seconds. Sume's docs state that every Music Router model charges the fixed Music price per audio generation, which is $0.125, and that the catalog lists the provider price per model for reference.

What the extra cents cover, from the docs

Those are conveniences, not quality claims. Sume's docs do not say the audio from the two routes differs, and Sume's Music 1.0 page says it runs on Google Lyria 3.5.

• sume/music-auto chooses the engine and echoes the one that ran in job.request.routed_model, so a future engine change does not break your integration.
• The same job lifecycle (status, result, webhooks, idempotency) serves music, video, TTS and Timeline.
• The audio artifact lands on a Sume-hosted URL, which is exactly what Timeline requires for a soundtrack or an audio spine.

A rule for choosing

If you only need a handful of loops and you already hold a Gemini API account, call Google directly and import the file into Sume when Timeline needs it. If you generate beds as one step in an automated ad pipeline, the extra $0.05 buys you fewer integration surfaces. At 40 beds the gap is 40 × $0.05 = $2.00 in total. At 40,000 beds it is $2,000, and the answer may change.