Musician's EP rollout: cover drafts and 4 teasers for $1.80

A musician releasing an EP before the end of the year can get eight cover drafts and four captioned 30-second teasers for $1.80 on Sume. The cover drafts are eight Ideogram 4.5 images at $0.075 (medium quality), $0.60, and each teaser is one timeline render at $0.10 plus one caption job at $0.20, $1.20 for four.

The audio is your own finished master. Nothing here generates music; the teaser takes a 30-second section of your file and puts art and lyric text over it. If you do use AI-generated music anywhere in a release, check each distributor's disclosure rules before you upload.

Cover drafts

Ideogram 4.5 is a good first model to try for covers that carry the title and artist name as text, since lettering is the part of a cover that most needs to come out right. Medium quality is $0.075 per image on Sume; low is $0.0375 and high is $0.275. Draft eight at medium, choose two, and only then consider a high-quality final, which would add $0.55 for two. Most streaming services want a square cover, so use a 1:1 aspect ratio and check the pixel minimum on the services you upload to.

Spelling is the failure mode. Read the generated text letter by letter, and be ready to set the title in your own design tool over a text-free version if it comes out wrong.

Teasers cut from your master

Import the master, then render a timeline with the cover as a still in the video slot, the master as the audio spine, an in-point (the audio source_in field) at the hook, and a duration of 30 seconds. Output defaults to vertical 1080 by 1920; set the still's fit to contain or blur so a square cover is not cropped. A render under one minute is billed as one minute, $0.10.

For lyric captions, send the rendered video to the caption job with the lyric lines as the script text. The standalone caption job is $0.20 for videos up to 60 seconds, so 30-second teasers fit comfortably. Write the lines yourself from your lyric sheet instead of relying on speech recognition, because singing is where transcripts go wrong. Burned-in captions cannot be switched off, so check the timing against the audio before you publish.

Variations

Four teasers cover four sections of one song, or one section of each of four songs. Swapping a cover requires only a $0.10 re-render per teaser, but a lyric change requires another $0.20 caption job, so lock the lyric text before captioning. If you keep the clean render, a lyric fix costs $0.20 instead of $0.30.