Google upgrades AI music creation with Lyria 3.5
Google’s latest Lyria model brings more expressive vocals, improved musicality and greater creative control to Flow Music.
Google has upgraded its AI music generation model with Lyria 3.5, promising more natural music, better lyrics and more expressive vocals.
The latest model launched on July 29 inside Google Flow Music, the company’s AI music creation platform. According to Google, Lyria 3.5 improves several areas of music generation while giving users more control over how their tracks are created.
It’s another sign that AI music tools are moving quickly from novelty generators towards increasingly capable creative platforms.
What’s new in Lyria 3.5?
Google says Lyria 3.5 brings improvements across four key areas: musicality, lyrics, vocals and creative control.
The model can generate richer and more complex melodic structures, which Google says should sound more natural.
Lyrics have also been upgraded, with better prompt adherence and greater awareness of song structure. That should make it easier to guide a generated track towards a particular idea rather than hoping the model lands somewhere close.
The biggest upgrade may be the vocals.
Google says Lyria 3.5 produces more realistic and emotionally nuanced vocals, with improved pronunciation and greater expression. For anyone who has experimented with AI music, vocals are one of the areas where artificial-sounding results can quickly give themselves away, so this is an important part of the update.
There’s also more creative control. Users can more easily adjust the tempo and duration of their generated music, giving them greater influence over the final result.
Google is taking AI music seriously
Lyria 3.5 isn’t arriving in isolation. Google has steadily expanded its AI music ambitions throughout the year. Lyria 3 launched in February, allowing users to generate 30-second tracks from text or image prompts, before Lyria 3 Pro arrived a month later with support for tracks of up to three minutes and more awareness of traditional song structures such as verses and choruses.
Flow Music is also becoming a more important part of that strategy. According to MBW, the platform was acquired by Google earlier this year and has since been expanded with Lyria-powered music creation tools.
In May, Google partnered with Believe to make Flow Music available to artists, producers and songwriters through Believe and TuneCore. Google positioned the platform as a creative collaborator for exploring lyrics, melodies, genres and instruments rather than simply an automatic song generator.
That positioning is worth watching. The competition between AI music platforms such as Google, Suno and Udio is increasingly about giving musicians more ways to shape what the technology creates, rather than simply producing a song from a single prompt.
Questions around AI training remain
There is another reason Lyria 3.5 is worth paying attention to. Google’s latest announcement focuses heavily on the capabilities of the new model. However, unlike the company’s Lyria 3 announcement earlier this year, it does not provide equivalent detail about how Lyria 3.5 was trained or mention SynthID, Google’s AI watermarking technology.
That is notable because Google is already facing legal scrutiny over the training of its Lyria models.
As we covered previously, a group of independent musicians and songwriters sued Google in March, alleging that copyrighted music from YouTube was used to train Lyria 3. The complaint claimed that at least 44 million clips and 280,000 hours of music had been copied.
Google has disputed the allegations and argued that YouTube’s terms grant it and its affiliates broad rights to use uploaded content. The company has also previously said that its AI music models are trained using material that Google and YouTube have the right to use under their terms, partner agreements and applicable law.
The legal question is far from settled, but the issue matters to independent artists. As AI music models become more powerful, musicians need to know not only what these tools can create, but where the material used to develop them comes from.
AI can create the track, but artists still build the career
Lyria 3.5 shows just how quickly AI music generation is improving. Better vocals, stronger musicality and more creative control are making these tools increasingly capable.
But for independent artists, the bigger opportunity may be in using these tools selectively rather than using them to create more music.
AI-generated music is reaching platforms at unprecedented levels, with Deezer recently reporting that it was receiving around 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day. AI music even accounted for more than half of new uploads on some peak days in June.
Despite that huge volume, fully AI-generated music represented only around 1-3% of listening on the platform. In other words, being able to generate a song doesn’t mean people will listen to it.
That’s an important distinction as tools like Lyria, Suno and Udio become more sophisticated. AI may make it easier to produce music, but it doesn’t automatically give that music an audience, an identity or a reason for listeners to come back.
For independent artists, that makes the human side of music more important, not less. A distinctive sound, genuine connection with listeners and a recognisable artist identity can be far more valuable than simply increasing the number of tracks you release.
Moving forward with AI
If you’re using AI as part of your creative process, think about where it genuinely adds something to your workflow rather than using it simply to increase output. Make sure you understand the tool’s terms, how its music is created and what rights you have over the resulting work before releasing it commercially.
Once you’ve created music you’re ready to release, digital distribution remains the bridge between your music and listeners. With RouteNote, you can distribute your releases to major streaming platforms around the world for free and start building your audience wherever they listen.
Distribute your music to streaming platforms worldwide for free with RouteNote today.