Tier 2 Restricted open-weight
What the publisher claims: open-source code, open weights
The one-liner: The reference open music-generation stack, whose weights are non-commercial.
The six questions
Weights for all four published MusicGen sizes are downloadable from the publisher's Hugging Face repositories.
The weights are non-commercial under CC-BY-NC 4.0 even though the surrounding code is MIT, so the practically usable grant is narrow.
Fully self-hostable with the published AudioCraft code on consumer hardware for the smaller checkpoints.
Papers and model cards describe the architecture and training data at a high level; the corpus and recipe are not released.
Limited.
The MIT-licensed facebookresearch/audiocraft repo has issues enabled and merges outside contributors' work steadily (roughly 49 non-bot external merges among its most recent 57 merged PRs), but Meta alone sets the research agenda and cuts every MusicGen release.
License
MIT for the AudioCraft code; CC-BY-NC 4.0 for the MusicGen model weights — license source ↗
- The published MusicGen weights are non-commercial: CC-BY-NC 4.0 prohibits commercial use of the licensed material
- Commercial deployment of MusicGen requires separate permission from Meta
- Code and weights carry different licences in the same repository
What is actually released
- MusicGen weights (small, medium, large, melody)
- AudioCraft inference and training code
- EnCodec codec
- model cards and papers
Why it matters
The clearest case in the dataset of code openness and weight openness diverging inside a single release — you may run and modify it, but you may not sell what it makes.
Sources
- https://github.com/facebookresearch/audiocraft
- https://huggingface.co/facebook/musicgen-medium
- https://sonilo.com/blog/guides/audiocraft-musicgen-audiogen-encodec-builder-guide
Derived from the openness dataset behind But Is It Open? — snapshot 2026-11-07 ↗. Scores are qualitative readings of the cited evidence, not verdicts; tier measures openness, not intelligence.