Comparison
Bed, hook or score: Cutroom owns the bed
Music does three different jobs in a video and one tool is rarely good at two of them. A bed sits under a voice. A hook is meant to be remembered. A score carries a piece with no narration. This page names the tool that owns each job and what one track costs. By the end you will know which word describes yours.
- Credits for one Cutroom track, sung or instrumental
- 20
- Distinct jobs music does in a video, each with a different answer
- 3
Bed, hook or score: the word you pick decides the shortlist
A tool excellent at one of these is often mediocre at another. Reviews that ignore the distinction are why people end up with a track they cannot use.
A bed is background. Steady, unremarkable, nothing that steals the second before a price is mentioned. A hook is meant to be remembered, usually sung, usually short. A score carries emotion across a piece with little narration in it.
Most ad soundtracks fail as beds while being judged as songs. A track picked on headphones, alone, at full volume, was picked under the wrong conditions.
Write down which of the three you need before you open anything. Every generator on this page will happily sell you the other two.
Say the word out loud before you open a tab. Bed, hook or score. The wrong word costs a subscription you stop using in March.
Three jobs, three different answers
Name the job in one word and the shortlist collapses to a single tool. Skip this step and you buy the wrong subscription.
Bed
Steady, unnoticed, under a voice-over
Hook
Sung, short, meant to be remembered
Score
Emotion across a piece with little narration
Suno wins the sung hook, Udio wins the score and the afternoon
Suno gets from an idea to a finished track with vocals in a couple of minutes, across a wide range of styles. Nothing else moves from a written line to something that sounds like a real recording as quickly.
It is right for a brand anthem, a jingle you want people to hum, or anything where the music is the deliverable.
It is wrong for a bed. Ask for background music and it still gives you a song, because that is what it is for. Taming it takes longer than picking something plain in the first place.
Udio is where people go when audio quality matters more than the speed of getting some. Arrangement detail and section-level control, so you shape a track instead of accepting or rejecting a whole generation.
Four passes at one chorus is a normal afternoon there. That is the value and the cost in the same sentence, and it is the wrong trade when music is a five minute chore.
Both publish their own plans and both revise them, so read the current page rather than a table in an article.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
A stock library still wins the one case with a lawyer in it
This list is about generators. The honest note is that a curated library still wins when certainty is what you are buying.
A human curator already judged the track as background, and the rights position is settled and written down. You find it by browsing rather than by describing.
Generation beats libraries on specificity. Libraries beat generation on certainty. On a campaign with real spend behind it, a cleared track removes an argument you do not want to have with a client.
Rights to AI-generated music vary by tool, by plan and by country, and the position is still moving. Read the current terms of whatever you use, and do not take a comparison page's word for it, this one included.
Keep the licence, the plan and the date in the same folder as the ad. If a platform queries the audio later, that record already exists.
Cutroom owns the bed, because it never leaves the edit
Write lyrics and describe a style for a sung track. Leave the words empty and get an instrumental bed. One track costs 20 credits, any length.
It appears inside the ad you are already cutting, and you set the level against the speech on the same screen. No separate tab, no download, no drag into a second tool, no third subscription.
That removes the errand and the ten minutes attached to it. For a bed, the errand was the entire cost.
There is no section-level editing, no stems and no regenerating a chorus. For a track nobody is supposed to notice, none of those change the outcome.
A thirty-second ad with a bed under it costs 130 credits: 100 for the batch, 20 for the track, 10 for the export.
Judge it inside the ad, never alone. A bed that sounds dull in isolation is usually correct.
- Sung hook, jingle, anything memorable. Suno.
- Score, iteration and audio quality first. Udio, and an afternoon.
- A cleared bed with no legal questions. A curated stock library.
- A bed inside an ad you are already editing. Cutroom, at 20 credits a track.
Tracks per plan, if credits went nowhere else
At 20 credits a track. In practice the batch and the export take most of a month, which is the point: the music is the cheap part.
- Premium, 5,000 credits250 tracks
- Basic, 2,500 credits125 tracks
- Top-up, 1,000 credits for $1550 tracks
- Trial, 300 credits, no card15 tracks
Read your script out loud with the track under it
That is the whole test and it takes thirty seconds. Play the ad at phone volume, in a room with some noise in it, and read your own words over the top.
If you lose the sentence carrying the price or the guarantee, the track is wrong however good it sounded alone. If you stop noticing the music by the fourth second, it is right.
Length matters more than people expect. A thirty-second ad wants about thirty seconds of music with a clean start. Fading a two minute song out at thirty seconds is audible.
None of this changes with a better generator. It is a decision about what the music is for, and it happens before any tool is involved.
Suno and Cutroom, row by row
Two rows go to Suno and they are the ones about making music. The other six are about music that has to sit under a voice.
| Suno | Cutroom | |
|---|---|---|
| Style range | Wide catalogue of styles | Narrow by design |
| Iterating on the music | Regenerate, extend, retry | One track per request |
| Lives inside the edit | Separate tab, separate file | Set the level, done |
| Level set against the speech | Done in your editor | Same screen as the cut |
| Cost per track stated | Priced by plan tier | 20 credits, any length |
| Bed on request | Tends toward songs | Instrumental if you ask |
| Length matched to the ad | Trim it yourself | Track fits the cut |
| Cleared for commercial use | Depends on the plan | Read the current terms |
Questions people ask
- Should ad music have vocals?
- Not when there is a voice-over. Two vocal lines fight and the read loses. Sung tracks make sense when the music is the message, like a jingle, or when there is no narration at all.
- How loud should the music sit?
- Quiet enough that you stop noticing it and loud enough that its absence would feel flat. Set it, watch the whole ad once, and if you can hear the music while reading the captions it is too loud.
- Is AI-generated music safe to use in paid ads?
- It removes the biggest common risk, which is using a commercial recording you have no rights to. It does not remove the need to read the terms of the tool and plan you are on, because commercial rights differ and are still changing.
- How long should the generated track run?
- As long as the ad. For a 30-second vertical ad that means about 30 seconds with a clean start. A track that outlives the cut has to be faded, and a fade at 30 seconds is audible.
- When should I buy a dedicated music tool instead?
- When the track is the deliverable. Jingles, anthems, launch films and anything meant to be remembered belong to Suno or Udio. Anyone who needs cleared rights signed off by a client should buy a curated library.
Name the job in one word. If the word is bed, it already sits next to the pace and the captions for 20 credits a track.