The news: Google’s Lyria 3 music generation tool could expand access to personalized audio for brands, challenge the stock music market, and make the company a fresh competitor to startups like ElevenLabs and Suno.

• The Gemini-powered offering can create a 30-second track from a text prompt, photo, or video, with cover art made by Nano Banana.
• Google said that Lyria 3 improves on its predecessors because it can generate lyrics, offer more creative control over elements like style and tempo, and create more realistic and complex tracks.

Zooming out: Before the advent of AI, brands’ primary options for getting music for campaigns or ads included hiring human artists to create original music, licensing music from labels, or using stock music markets like AudioJungle or Shutterstock Music.

If brands can create royalty-free, on-brand, customized songs to fit visuals, their reliance on those traditional music sources could decline.

• One-third of global marketers have used voice or music generators, per HubSpot.
• However, nearly half (45%) of US adults anticipate there will be fewer jobs for musicians over the next 20 years because of AI, per Pew Research, indicating labor risk for human creatives in an AI-driven world.

Being built into Google’s already-popular Gemini app gives Lyria 3 a wide base of potential users at its onset, an advantage that isn’t shared by standalone applications like ElevenLabs and Suno. On the flip side, ElevenLabs and Suno can craft much longer songs, including eight-minute-long tracks with Suno’s V4.5 and V5 models.

Implications for brands: With AI music being cheap, instant, and personalized, we could see brands crafting different soundtracks by geography, different song vibes by audience segment and demographic, and A/B testing audio versions for performance lift.

• AI-generated soundtracks could become the next creative optimization lever.
• Lyria 3 could also encourage more original soundtracks for social content like YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels, providing a supply-side growth tool but risking the proliferation of AI slop.