MiniMax open-sources Music 3.0, a five-minute full-song generator
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra105 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.544 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen135 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.774 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 44 days before it.
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.
Sources
6 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
6 sources: 5 primary, 1 press
Primary
- MiniMax: Music 3.0, next-generation open-weights music modelminimax.io, official
- Hugging Face: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-Music3huggingface.co, code
- GitHub: MiniMax-AI/MiniMax-Music3github.com, code
- MiniMax model release notesplatform.minimax.io, docs
- MiniMax pay-as-you-go pricing (service adjustment notice)platform.minimax.io, docs
Press
- ComfyUI blog: MiniMax Music 3blog.comfy.org, press
Changes
- Filed