Eleven Music v2.5: How to Make Songs With Your Own Lyrics

Eleven Music v2.5 is ElevenLabs' newest music model, and it is the one to pick when the words matter. You describe the style, paste your lyrics, choose how long the song should be, and it sings them. On BudgetPixel it costs 200 credits a minute, billed by the second, and it works on every plan in the Audio Workshop.

Below: four songs it made, a test where we gave the same lyrics to four song models, how to make your own, and what it costs.

Four songs made with Eleven Music v2.5

Each song below comes with the exact prompt that made it. The lyrics were written for these songs.

Your lyrics, sung as written. A 50-second soul song:

Warm soul, 96 BPM, electric piano, bass, brushed drums, intimate female lead. Sing exactly.
Lyrics:
Copper rain at dawn
Footsteps on the stair
Set the kettle on
Leave a little chair

Another language. Write the lyrics in that language and say who sings them:

Warm bolero, 92 BPM, nylon guitar, congas, upright bass, gentle Spanish lead.
Lyrics:
Guardo luz aquí
Bajo el cielo gris
Cruza el aire azul
Vuelvo hacia el sur

A jingle. Short, bright and on the beat:

Bright disco-funk jingle, 116 BPM, guitar, bass, claps, playful female lead. Sing exactly.
Lyrics:
Pocket the morning
Zip up the blue
Carry a small spark
Make something new

An instrumental with a shape. Describe how the music should change over time, and turn on Instrumental:

Instrumental, 172 BPM: ambient intro with airy pads and piano, then drum and bass with rapid breakbeats and deep sub bass; return to quiet piano, moving from tense to relieved.

Same lyrics, four song models

We gave four of BudgetPixel's song models the same eight lines and the same style description on November 14, 2026, one take each, with Music 3.0's lyrics optimizer turned off so it would not rewrite them:

Warm acoustic pop, 100 BPM, nylon-string guitar, light hand percussion and upright bass, a clear female lead who sings every word plainly. No backing choir.

Paper lanterns on the river,
counting boats that never came,
Grandma hums a harbor waltz
and calls the gulls by name.

Hold the lantern higher,
let the tide come in,
every light we gave away
comes back to us again.

To check the words, we separated each song's vocals from the music and had two transcription models write down what they heard.

Two more things happened. Lyria 3 refused the lyrics on the first try as possibly copyrighted, although we wrote them for this test; the same request went through on the second try, and the refusal cost nothing. And only Eleven Music v2.5 lets you choose the length: the other three decide it themselves.

Listen and judge the sound for yourself (the four tracks are matched in loudness):

The cover art for this song was made with Seedream 5.5.

How to make a song with Eleven Music v2.5

1. Open the Audio Workshop and pick Eleven Music v2.5 as the model.
2. Describe the style in the prompt: genre, tempo in BPM, the main instruments and who sings, for example "warm soul, 96 BPM, electric piano, brushed drums, intimate female lead".
3. Paste your lyrics in the Lyrics box, one line per sung line, with a blank line between verse and chorus. Leave it empty and turn on Instrumental for music without vocals.
4. Set the Track length, from 10 seconds to 5 minutes. The presets run from 15 seconds to 5 minutes, and the price shows next to the length.
5. Generate. Ours came back in 16 seconds for a minute of music. Listen, download the MP3, or try again with a changed prompt.

Prompt tips that worked for us

• Name the genre, the tempo and the voice. "Hopeful synth-pop, 118 BPM, clear Japanese lead" gives the model more to work with than "a happy song".
• Keep lyric lines short and singable. In our songs, short lines with simple words almost always came back word for word.
• Describe the arrangement over time for anything longer than a jingle: "ambient intro, then drum and bass, then a return to quiet piano" gave us a 90-second piece that starts quiet, builds, and settles again.
• Match the length to the lyrics. Our four-line songs ran 50 seconds and the eight-line test song a minute; for a full song with verses and a chorus, ask for 2 to 3 minutes.
• Leave out artists and song titles. "In the style of" a named artist, a song title or a real song's lyrics gets the prompt refused. Describe the sound instead: the instruments, the tempo, the decade, the mood.

What Eleven Music v2.5 costs

200 credits per minute, billed per second of the length you ask for, with a 10-second minimum:

• A song that fails or is refused costs nothing.
• Free accounts in eligible regions get 300 credits a month, enough for a 90-second song. Paid plans start at $10 a month for 11,000 credits; see pricing.
• For comparison, Music 3.0 costs 200 credits a song, Lyria 3 100 and Mureka V9 60, whatever length they come out.

From code or an AI assistant

The same model is on the BudgetPixel API. Send the style, the lyrics and the length, then poll the job until the MP3 is ready:

curl -X POST https://api.budgetpixel.com/v1/audios/eleven-music-v2.5 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $BUDGETPIXEL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "prompt": "Warm acoustic pop, 100 BPM, nylon-string guitar, upright bass, clear female lead.",
    "lyrics": "Paper lanterns on the river,\ncounting boats that never came",
    "duration": 60
  }'
# then GET /v1/audios/{id} until status is succeeded; the song is at audio_url

duration is 10 to 300 seconds (60 if you leave it out), and instrumental: true makes music without vocals; it can't be combined with lyrics. AI assistants connected to BudgetPixel's MCP server reach the same model through the generate_music tool. Generating through the API or the MCP server needs a paid plan.

Eleven Music v2.5 or Music 3.0?

• Pick Eleven Music v2.5 when you need a set length (a 15-second jingle, a 2-minute track for a video), when the lyrics must be sung as written, or when you want the song back fast.
• Pick Music 3.0 when you want a song and don't mind its length, or when you'd like it to write the lyrics for you from your description: its lyrics optimizer does that.

Either way, the song can go straight into a video: see how to make an AI music video.

Sources: our own runs with these models on November 13 and 14, 2026; prices and limits from BudgetPixel's model catalog, checked November 14, 2026.