MusicGen
MetaMusicGen is Meta's transformer model that generates instrumental music from a text description, and in its melody variants from a text description guided by a reference melody. It comes in 300M, 1.5B and 3.3B sizes with mono and stereo builds, plus style-conditioned and stem-separated variants, and runs through Meta's AudioCraft library.
AudioCraft, the library that runs and trains MusicGen, is a separate entry.
Openness
2 high confidence- weights
- open(every MusicGen checkpoint downloads from Hugging Face without a gate)
- data
- described(trained on 20K hours of licensed music from Meta, Shutterstock and Pond5
- code
- open(the MusicGen training pipeline is published in AudioCraft)
- license
- CC-BY-NC-4.0(the weights
The MusicGen weights are licensed for non-commercial use only, even though the code that trains and runs them is MIT. Meta publishes the training pipeline, and the licensed training music is described but not provided.
- https://huggingface.co/facebook/musicgen-medium/raw/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-26
Card: "Code is released under MIT, model weights are released under CC-BY-NC 4.0"; "The model was trained on licensed data using the following sources: the Meta Music Initiative Sound Collection, Shutterstock music collection and the Pond5 music collection."
- https://ungh.cc/repos/facebookresearch/audiocraft/files/main/docs/MUSICGEN.md recorded 2026-09-26
"we do NOT provide any of the datasets used for training MusicGen"; "The MusicGenSolver implements MusicGen's training pipeline."
- https://ungh.cc/repos/facebookresearch/audiocraft/files/main/LICENSE_weights recorded 2026-09-26
LICENSE_weights body: "Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International".
Adoption
4 high confidenceAdoption is measured as Hugging Face downloads across the MusicGen checkpoints, nearly all of them for musicgen-medium.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models?search=musicgen&author=facebook&sort=downloads&direction=-1&limit=100 recorded 2026-09-26
Listing sorted by downloads: musicgen-medium 1947422, musicgen-small 142904, musicgen-large 89340 in the trailing 30 days.
Capability
2 medium confidenceMusicGen places last on the instrumental music arena, a step below Stable Audio and far below the closed services. It is still one of only two downloadable model families ranked there.
- https://artificialanalysis.ai/music/leaderboard/instrumental recorded 2026-09-26
Leaderboard entry "MusicGen" (rank 19 of 19, Elo 882.3) on "AA-Music-Instrumental v1.1".
Verified 2026-09-26