ElevenLabs adds section editing to its ElevenMusic song tool

ElevenLabs has put a section editor inside ElevenMusic. The feature, called Composer, was announced on Tuesday, August 25 and is available now, and it does the one thing generative music tools have been bad at: it lets a user change a single part of a track without shuffling everything around it. Music Business Worldwide's Mandy Dalugdug reported the launch on August 27.

Tracks can be built from a user's own lyrics, from an existing recording, from a text prompt or from nothing. Once a track exists, a verse can be rewritten, a bridge slowed, or a chorus moved into another key, with style, tempo, energy, instrumentation and length adjustable per section. Composer generates several takes of a section so they can be compared, and the running order can be reshuffled, doubled or extended. "When you regenerate one section, the rest of your track stays untouched," the company said.

The timing is competitive rather than coincidental. Suno launched its browser-based digital audio workstation in September 2025 and released Studio 2.0 on August 13 with MIDI support, a chat bar in beta and improved stem separation. Google added song generation and editing to Spaces inside its Flow Music platform on July 24, including section replacement and track extension. Part of the capability was already inside ElevenLabs' own Music v2 model, released on May 26, and Composer builds a proper editor around it.

The scale of these businesses is uneven and only partly disclosed. ElevenLabs does not publish ElevenMusic subscriber numbers. It said in May that it had crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $350 million at the end of 2025, and credited enterprise voice agents rather than music for the jump. On the music side it said in March that nearly 14 million tracks had been made on the platform, and in April that more than 4,000 independent and emerging artists were using it. Suno is more forthcoming: chief executive Mikey Shulman said in February that it had 2 million paid subscribers, $300 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 100 million people who had tried it. Udio publishes nothing.

Investors have taken all three seriously. ElevenLabs was valued at $11 billion in a Series D announced in February, part of more than $550 million raised across three closes. Suno reached a $5.4 billion valuation in June, more than double the $2.45 billion it hit in a $250 million Series C in November 2025.

Licensing is where the three companies diverge hardest. ElevenLabs holds music agreements with Merlin, the publisher Kobalt and Believe, and struck a partnership with Splice in May. Suno and Udio both launched without deals and were sued by the majors. Udio has since settled with Universal and Warner and added Merlin, Kobalt, Believe and the National Music Publishers' Association, leaving Sony Music as the only major still in litigation with it, having filed a second suit on July 20 over 30,117 recordings. Suno settled with Warner in November 2025, licensed BMG on August 12, and is still fighting Universal and Sony, on top of two class actions over a user data breach and a German copyright ruling that went GEMA's way. The labels are meanwhile drafting rules for how AI tracks should count on the charts.