Overview
AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist) is an AI composition service founded in Luxembourg in 2016. It specializes in instrumental composition for classical, cinematic, game and ambient music, and is known as the first AI registered as a composer by SACEM, the French society of authors.
Where Suno and Udio excel at vocal songs from text, AIVA is focused on composer workflows — MIDI editing, style learning, and score export — making it a complement rather than a replacement.
Key Features
1. Lyra — an instrumental-only foundation model
AIVA generates with its own foundation model, Lyra, which produces instrumental tracks of 30 seconds to 10 minutes from natural-language prompts. It is a transformer operating over token sequences produced by AIVA's OmniCodec. A post-trained variant called Influence takes a reference audio file and generates an original composition that shares the reference's core musical characteristics.
2. Style-based generation
Pick from 250+ preset styles — "Cinematic", "Pop", "Ambient", "Rock", "Tango" and many more — and generate a piece in seconds. AIVA also offers an Influences feature that lets you upload reference tracks so the model learns a target style.
3. MIDI and score editing
Generated pieces can be exported as MIDI and MusicXML for your DAW or notation software. This fits an AI-sketch / human-finish workflow well. Inside AIVA you can also edit the piano roll directly.
4. Step-by-step control
- Length, tempo, key
- Instrumentation (solo piano, string quartet, full orchestra, etc.)
- Emotion tags (dramatic, joyful, melancholic, and so on)
5. Commercial licensing
Only the Pro plan transfers copyright to you. On Free and Standard the copyright stays with AIVA, and Standard limits monetization to YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram. If you need unrestricted use in film, games or advertising, Pro is the tier you need.
Plans & Pricing
Billed annually the effective rate is €11/mo for Standard and €33/mo for Pro (both plus VAT); billed monthly it is €15 and €49. The tiers differ mainly on download count, maximum track length, file formats and rights.
| Plan | Per month (annual / monthly) | Downloads | Max length | Formats | Rights |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | €0 | 3/mo | 3 min | MP3 / MIDI | AIVA owns copyright, no monetization |
| Standard | €11 / €15 (+VAT) | 15/mo | 5 min | MP3 / MIDI | AIVA owns copyright, limited monetization |
| Pro | €33 / €49 (+VAT) | 300/mo | 5 min 30 sec | All formats including WAV | You own the copyright, unrestricted monetization |
Typical Use Cases
- Film and game BGM: indie projects with tight budgets
- YouTubers and podcasters: copyright-cleared background music
- Composer ideation: generate sketches and flesh them out in a DAW
- Education: supplementary material for music theory and composition
Strengths
- ✅ High quality for instrumental, classical and cinematic styles, across 250+ style presets
- ✅ MIDI export integrates cleanly into DAW workflows
- ✅ The Pro tier hands you full copyright with no monetization restrictions
- ✅ Training data leans on classical and cinematic works, much of it public domain, keeping rights risk low
- ✅ Longest track record in the space (since 2016) and solid stability
Weaknesses
- ❌ No vocal generation — for lyric-driven music use Suno or Udio; any singing has to be recorded yourself or sourced elsewhere and layered on top
- ❌ Suno and Udio can sound more natural and varied
- ❌ The free plan is tight: 3 downloads a month, 3-minute cap, and AIVA keeps the copyright
- ❌ Standard also leaves copyright with AIVA and confines monetization to YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram
- ❌ Interface skews advanced; beginners face a learning curve
Official Resources
- Website: https://aiva.ai
- Blog: https://blog.aiva.ai
- X (Twitter): @AIVAmusic