AI music is already charting. Korea is slow to respond

An artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted song's entry into Melon's Top 100 chart has exposed a regulatory vacuum over AI music in Korea, just weeks after the country's largest music copyright collective withdrew its first attempt to allow the registration of such works.

"Forest of the Heart," released in May by YouTube creator Joseon HipHop, peaked at No. 89 on the Top 100 chart and No. 99 on the daily chart for Melon, one of the country's top streaming platforms, according to Yonhap News Agency.

The creator wrote the lyrics and produced the melody and vocals using Suno, a generative music AI service. The track became popular by word of mouth, especially among listeners in their 40s.

The song has since dropped out of both charts, but its run showed that AI-assisted music can already reach mainstream listeners here, well before rules on authorship and royalties are in place.

In March, the Board of Audit and Inspection said 29 composers had submitted more than 200 songs each to the Korea Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) in 2024, and roughly 5,200 of those songs showed signs of generative AI use.

Rules scrapped after 22 days

On Aug. 3, KOMCA responded with rules allowing AI-assisted music to be registered for trust management when a person has made a contribution to the lyrics, composition and arrangement or other aspects of the work. Songs made simply by entering prompts were excluded.

The rules quickly drew pushback. Critics argued that no social consensus had been reached on the issue, and the ministry sent KOMCA an official letter on Aug. 18 calling for broader public discussion. In response, KOMCA's board withdrew the rules on Aug. 25, cancelling registrations made in the interim.

That has left creators without clear guidance. The government has held since 2023 that AI output without human creative input cannot be protected by copyright, but there is still no concrete standard for how much human involvement a song needs to qualify for royalty collection through KOMCA.

Joseon HipHop, for example, receives no copyright royalties from "Forest of the Heart" and is paid only through neighboring rights as the track's producer.

Detection is another hurdle. KOMCA and five other music industry groups are in the final stages of selecting a provider for an AI music detection program. Such tools, however, reportedly still struggle to spot tracks in which AI handled only part of the work.

Lee Jong-pil, CEO of Neutune, a Korean startup that develops attribution and rights-tracking technology for AI music, said the flood of AI-generated tracks is "deepening distortions" across the music distribution system. He said Korea must respond quickly and consistently while preparing for broader changes in how music is created, distributed, licensed and compensated.

“Rather than responding to individual short-term issues, the key is to design the system preemptively, with the entire AI music ecosystem that lies ahead in mind,” he told The Korea Times.

Global benchmarks

Other markets have drawn clearer lines on human authorship.

The U.S. Copyright Office concluded in January 2025 that prompts alone are not enough for copyright protection, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined in March to hear a challenge to the human authorship requirement.

Collecting societies such as BMI and ASCAP in the U.S. and SOCAN in Canada, which license music and distribute royalties to songwriters, accept AI-assisted works with identifiable human contributions, such as lyrics or melodies, while rejecting works generated solely through prompts. Germany's GEMA and the Netherlands' BumaStemra take similar approaches.

The fight over training data has moved even faster. On July 31, a Munich court ruled that Suno infringed copyrights by using works represented by GEMA to train its models and reproducing them in its outputs, in a first-instance decision that is not yet final.

At the same time, major labels have begun shifting from litigation toward licensing. Suno launched its v6 model on Sept. 9, and says it was developed with licensed material from Warner Music Group, BMG and distributor Believe. Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are still suing the company.

All three major labels made investments last month in Stability AI, which says its music models are trained on licensed data.

Meanwhile, KOMCA says it is working to establish legal and institutional standards through public discussions involving lawmakers, the government, creators and industry representatives.

With AI-assisted songs already being released, streamed and, in at least one case, climbing a major chart, the question for Korea's music industry is no longer whether AI music will enter the mainstream, but whether the rules can catch up now that it has.