Suno
Full songs with vocals from a text description or your own lyrics.
Use it if
- You want a birthday song, a jingle or a theme for a small project
- You have lyrics and no way to hear them sung
- You want a placeholder track before paying a musician
Skip it if
- You need a specific sound and will not accept close-enough
- You plan to sell the music without reading the rights carefully
- You are hoping it will make you a musician
Suno is the music version of asking for a picture. Type “an upbeat folk song about my dad turning seventy, with his dog in the chorus” and a minute later there is a song, with a singer, that did not exist before. The first time, it is startling.
Where it fits
Gifts and small jobs. A birthday song with the right names in it. A jingle for a podcast or a stall. A theme for a home video. Hearing your own lyrics sung when you cannot sing. Anything where “a song that is roughly this” is the whole brief.
Where it does not
Anything where you know exactly what you want. It takes direction the way image generators do: loosely. You will get something close and then spend the time regenerating. And a real musician is still a real musician; this is for the things you would never have commissioned.
Honest limitations
I do not use it, so this is orientation. Read the rights before using a track for anything public or paid; what you may do with a song differs between the free and paid plans. And like every generator, asking twice gives you two different songs, so keep the one you like.
Next step
Make one on the free allowance for someone’s birthday. That tells you whether it is a toy or a tool for you. ElevenLabs is the spoken-word equivalent, and the one I actually run.
