Google just made AI music generation a first-class citizen in Gemini. The company’s new Lyria 3.5 model is rolling out directly in the Gemini app, letting users pick a genre and style, choose between vocals or instrumentals, and generate either short clips or longer tracks. Google claims the update delivers “more expressive vocals and richer musical arrangements” than the previous version. There’s also a set of templates — background music, personalized birthday songs — clearly aimed at people who’ve never touched a music generator before.
The release pushes well beyond the consumer app. Lyria 3.5 is also landing in Flow Music with extra features, in Google AI Studio for developers, and in Vids, Google’s video creation tool. That’s a broad distribution strategy: cover the casual user, the developer, and the video creator in one launch. It mirrors how Google has handled its other generative models, pushing them across the entire product surface rather than keeping them siloed in a single experimental tool.
The licensing angle is where Google is drawing a hard line against competitors. The company says Lyria was trained only on licensed content — a direct contrast to Suno, the AI music startup that’s been fighting copyright lawsuits from major labels over its training data. What Google hasn’t done is name a single licensor. No details on which catalogs, which deals, or what “licensed” actually covers. That vagueness matters. In the AI music space, “licensed” can mean anything from full royalty agreements to narrow technical licenses that don’t cover commercial output.
Lyria first appeared in late 2023 as a research preview, and the jump to 3.5 suggests Google has been iterating quickly behind the scenes. The real test won’t be whether the model sounds good in demos — it’s whether artists and labels actually get paid in a way they find acceptable, and whether Google can scale music generation without tripping over the same legal landmines that have dogged Suno and Udio. For now, Gemini users get a new toy. The music industry gets another reason to pay close attention.
