Unique music per video or one shared bed: a $0.125 question

A unique Lyria 3.5 track for each video in a 30-video month costs $3.75 on Sume, and one track reused across all 30 costs $0.125. Against a finished H3 Max clip at $0.80 (clip plus captions and render), a $0.125 track is 16% of the bill. Whether that is worth paying depends on whether viewers hear the repetition.

The arithmetic

Music generation is a flat $0.125 per track at the list rate read on 2026-10-03. That makes the per-video cost of a shared bed fall as the number of videos rises, while a unique track per video stays at $0.125 each.

The comparison below uses only the music line. It leaves out clips, captions and renders.

A middle path

Most series do not need either extreme. Buy three or four beds and rotate them: four beds cost $0.50 and give each bed about 8 uses in a 30-video month. A shared bed is also useful because audiences associate a sound with a series. A unique track makes sense for a hero video, an ad that will run a long time, or a product launch.

Generating several tracks and keeping the best one is a different spend from one track per video: five attempts to find one bed cost $0.625, which is still under one H3 Max clip.

How to decide

Think about where the audio will be heard. On a muted feed, a track is wasted. On a platform where sound is on by default, repetition is more noticeable. If you cannot say which applies, buy two beds and alternate them for a month.

The money is small either way. The reason to plan is not the $3.75; it is knowing the line exists when you scale. At 365 videos a year a unique track each costs $45.63, and a rotation of 12 beds costs $1.50.

• Hero and ad videos: a unique track.
• Series episodes: a rotating set of beds.
• Muted-feed content: skip music, or spend on captions.
• Record which bed went on which video so you can compare results.

Where music sits in the rest of the plan

A finished five-second H3 Max clip with captions and a one-minute render is $0.80, and a unique track adds $0.125 to it. On a Seedance 2.5 clip at 720p, a $3.189 finished clip makes the same track 4% of the total. The cheaper the clip, the more a track matters; for expensive clips it rounds to nothing. Decide per format, not for the whole account.

Keeping the tracks organized

If you do buy many tracks, store them with the prompt that made them and the video they went on. A $0.125 track you cannot find again is a $0.125 you pay twice. A short table in your repository, with columns for track file, prompt, mood and videos used, is enough. It also tells you which prompts produce beds you actually reuse, so the next batch needs fewer attempts.