MiniMax music API closed to new users: the Sume Music Router route

MiniMax's music guide says that starting August 20, 2026 its paid Music Generation and Lyrics Generation APIs are no longer available to new users, and the free music APIs are discontinued. If you need a music API now, Sume's Music Router takes a prompt at POST /v1/music-router/generate, and sume/music-auto picks the engine (Lyria 3.5 today).

MiniMax facts are from its page, read 2026-09-30; Sume facts from the Music Router docs.

What exactly did MiniMax change?

Existing paying users can continue with the current API services. The free Music-3.0-free, Music-2.6-free and music-cover-free APIs are discontinued. The page points to MiniMax Audio and to the open-source MiniMax Music 3 model on Hugging Face for experimenting.

How does the Sume Music Router work?

Send a prompt of 1 to 5000 characters with an Idempotency-Key header. Omit model or set it to sume/music-auto to let Sume choose; the routable ids are sume/music-auto, lyria-3.5 and lyria-3-pro. The body is the same as Music 1.0 plus the optional model, and an unknown id fails with 400 model_not_found and a catalog_url. Read the audio from result.artifacts[] where type is audio.

Is Sume a drop-in for MiniMax requests?

No. The field names differ and there is no lyrics endpoint described in these docs, so plan to rewrite the request. Put lyrics and structure in the prompt, and note that a non-empty negative_prompt is unsupported. Use GET /v1/music-router/models to list ids; see list the Music Router catalog.

What else should I check before switching?

Compare your use case against Suno alternatives and the Lyria notes in music generation API with Lyria. The engine that ran is reported in job.request.routed_model, so log it.