Rights and Responsible Use

Making music with AI raises two separate questions: what you're allowed to do with audio a model generates for you, and what you're allowed to do with other people's recordings you process with AI tools. They have different answers.

This lesson summarises SoundGen's Terms of Service. The Terms are what govern — read section 4, Intellectual Property Rights before relying on anything here, and check it again before a release in case it has changed.

Generated audio: what the Terms grant

Under section 4 of the Terms:

• You own the original content you create using the service.
• For AI-generated audio, you're granted a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free licence to use, modify and distribute it for personal and commercial purposes — including releasing and monetising it, and works that incorporate it, on music streaming, video and download platforms.
• The licence is the same whether the audio was made with free credits or any credit pack. It doesn't depend on which pack you bought and needs no ongoing subscription.
• It continues for audio you generated before your account is closed, or before the service stops operating. Your purchase receipts and generation history are a reasonable record of when content was generated.

A licence is not the same thing as copyright. Whether AI-generated audio can itself be protected by copyright is decided by law, not by the Terms. In the US, the Copyright Office's 2025 report concludes that prompts alone don't make you the author of what a model outputs, while your own human contributions — lyrics you wrote, parts you played, how you selected, arranged and edited the material — can be protected.

The excluded uses

Generated audio comes from third-party models, and SoundGen's licence to it is limited by theirs. Music and sound generation runs on ElevenLabs by default, and on Stability AI's Stable Audio where you choose that model. SoundGen records which model generated each track.

For audio generated with ElevenLabs models, unless SoundGen agrees otherwise in writing, the licence does not cover:

1. Use in film, television or radio, or in commercially released video games distributed on more than one platform.
2. Building a library, catalogue or collection of generated audio — such as a sample pack or sound library — in order to license, sell or otherwise make it available to others.

Using generated audio as part of your own compositions, recordings and productions is not affected by those exclusions. And the exclusions do not apply to audio generated with Stable Audio.

In practice: releasing a song you produced around a generated track is covered. Selling a pack of raw generated loops made with the default model is not. If you're planning a sync placement for film, TV or a multi-platform game, either generate with Stable Audio or get SoundGen's written agreement first — and in every case, check the current Terms.

Other people's recordings

AI tools make it easy to pull a vocal out of a hit, transcribe someone's riff or rebuild a famous track's parts. That doesn't change who owns them.

• Practice and study are the safe ground. Separating a song to learn its bass line, making a private karaoke track, or transcribing a melody to understand it are long-standing ways musicians learn.
• Releasing is different. If you release a remix, a track built on a sample, or anything that contains someone else's recording — even a short, heavily processed piece of a separated stem — you generally need permission from the owners of that recording and of the underlying song. A clean separation doesn't make the material yours.
• Covers have their own rules. Recording your own performance of someone else's song typically needs a licence for the composition, which distributors often help arrange — but that covers your recording, not theirs.
• Your own material is yours to reuse. Separating and sampling your own old demos, sessions and bounces is exactly what these tools are best for.

Prompts and imitation

SoundGen rejects generation prompts that name real artists, bands or songs. Describe the sound — instruments, era, production style — rather than asking for a specific person's voice or song. A song that's in a genre is music; a song engineered to pass as a particular artist invites problems that no licence fixes.

Practical habits

• Keep records. Your generation history shows what you made and with which model. Keep your project files and notes on any samples you used and where they came from.
• Know the model. If a track might go to film, TV, a game or a sample library, check which model generated it before you commit.
• Ask when unsure. For a significant release or placement, read the current Terms and, where needed, ask SoundGen or a music lawyer before you sign anything.