What a Song Maker's Commercial-Rights Page Actually Says

Verdict: Do not read the word “commercial” on a pricing page and stop. Find the tier, the download or credit rule, and the exclusions in the terms. Those three set the limits of what you may release, and only the vendor’s terms text binds you.

An AI song maker’s commercial-rights page is the part of the vendor’s terms that says what you may do with a generated track. This guide reads that page for one purpose: to tell you which words change your legal position and which words are marketing. It does not give a legal opinion, and it is not a substitute for advice from a lawyer who knows your jurisdiction.

Three words cause most of the confusion. In this guide, “free” means a free plan, not a free licence. “Royalty-free” describes how you pay for a track, not where you may use it. “Commercial” means the terms allow release or sale on the plan you would buy, with its conditions.

Start with the tier

Most vendors split their commercial terms by plan. A free plan often allows personal use only. A paid plan may allow commercial use, sometimes with conditions. The first job is to write down, for each plan you could buy, the single sentence that says what it allows.

Our scoring rule for this dimension, which carries 20% of the weight in the method, is deliberately narrow. It records the highest tier with a published commercial statement. A free-tier statement scores 100. A paid-tier statement scores 70. Personal-use-only scores 20. A tier with no published statement is not scored at all. We never turn a missing statement into a zero.

Read the conditions, not the headline

The table below quotes or closely paraphrases the wording on each vendor’s terms or pricing page. Each row shows what was checked and what was left out.

Look at the last column before you copy any row into a plan. A claim that is absent from the list is not a claim we are making for that vendor.

Download counts are part of the license

Suno’s terms tie commercial use to the download allocation for your tier. The terms state that commercial rights for a download you have obtained are not reduced by using up your allotment. They also state that nothing in that paragraph permits commercial use of a remix. In practice this means two things: an output you never downloaded through an approved channel is not covered, and a remix needs its own reading.

This is the most common gap between a headline and a license. Suno’s pricing page shows monthly download counts for each paid tier, and the terms make those counts the condition of commercial use.

Exclusions hide in the fine print

ElevenLabs’ FAQ carves out three kinds of work from its self-serve commercial permission: film, TV and game-studio output. Its pricing table labels the Starter tier “Commercial, no streaming”. Those two statements mean a track may be licensed for some uses and not others, even on a paid plan. If your plan is for a streaming release, the Starter label alone is enough reason to check the upgrade path.

Royalty-free is not the same as commercial

Some background-music vendors describe their output as royalty-free while restricting commercial use by tier. Mubert, which is outside this ranking, lists its free and Creator tiers as non-commercial on its pricing page, and that page says tracks cannot be placed on music streaming platforms or registered in content-matching systems. Our reading is that royalty-free describes what you do not pay per use. It does not, by itself, say you may sell or stream the track.

A short checklist

• Note the plan you would buy, and the sentence that governs commercial use on that plan.
• Find the download or credit condition that the sentence depends on.
• Search the terms for “streaming”, “film”, “TV”, “game” and “Content ID”. Copy any exclusion.
• Save the terms page with a date. Vendors revise terms, and a revision can change what you may do.
• If a headline and a clause disagree, the clause wins. Note the disagreement for the vendor.

The site’s position

Our ranking does not say that any tool’s output is commercially usable. It scores how clearly a vendor publishes its commercial terms. A tool whose terms are clear and restrictive can score higher than a tool whose headline is generous and whose terms we could not read. That is the intended result of the method: clarity counts, and marketing copy does not.