MiniMax open-sources Music 3.0, a five-minute full-song generator
MiniMax released the weights of MiniMax Music 3.0 (8B Global LLM + 0.6B Local LLM + flow-matching renderer), which writes, arranges and sings complete songs of up to about five minutes in one pass, under a community license allowing commercial use; a week later it closed its paid music API to new customers and pointed them to the open model.
Key facts
- music-3.0 first shipped on the MiniMax API on 2026-07-16; open weights on 2026-08-13 (MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-Music3)
- Architecture: 8B Global LLM (from Qwen3.5-8B) + 0.6B Local LLM + 2.4B flow matching + 123M Flow-VAE; 8-layer RVQ
- Output: 32 kHz 16-bit stereo WAV, songs up to ~5 min; 24 GB VRAM recommended, 8 GB with offload
- License: MiniMax-Music3 Community License; UI attribution required; separate authorization above US$20M annual revenue
- From 2026-08-20 MiniMax's paid Music and Lyrics Generation APIs are unavailable to new users (API was $0.15 per song up to 5 min)
What happened
MiniMax, which had iterated its closed Music models quickly (1.5 in Sept 2025, 2.0 Oct 2025, 2.5 Jan 2026, 2.6 Apr 2026, 3.0 Jul 2026), published the Music 3.0 checkpoint, code, demo and deployment instructions. Inputs are lyrics with section tags ([verse], [chorus], [bridge]...) plus a structured caption for genre, tempo, instrumentation and vocals. ComfyUI and diffusers added support at launch, and community GGUF quantizations followed.
Why it matters
It is one of the first times a major commercial music-model vendor open-sourced its current flagship song model, and the simultaneous retreat from selling a paid music API suggests the open release is a strategic pivot rather than a side project.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Models
- MiniMax Music 3.0 MiniMax · current
Related events
- ACE-Step 1.5: MIT-licensed song generator that runs on consumer GPUs ★★★
- MiniMax M3: open-weights 428B MoE with 1M context and native multimodality ★★★
Sources (6)
- officialMiniMax: Music 3.0, next-generation open-weights music model
- codeHugging Face: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-Music3
- codeGitHub: MiniMax-AI/MiniMax-Music3
- docsMiniMax model release notes
- docsMiniMax pay-as-you-go pricing (service adjustment notice)
- pressComfyUI blog: MiniMax Music 3
id: 2026-08-13-minimax-music-3-open-weights · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline