The story so far: Australia’s music industry body—the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA)—on August 25 banned songs wholly made using AI, noting such tracks will be ineligible for listing on its charts. The announcement comes after the viral fame that found an AI remix of Madonna’s 1989 song ‘Like a Prayer,’ made by Australian music producer and disc jockey Josh Fawaz earlier this year. The AI song enjoyed multiple weeks on the country’s top 20 chart and ranked second on ARIA’s top 20 Australian singles chart, per AP. It also scored over 23 million views on YouTube.
The use of AI to compose the song was not clearly disclosed initially, angering listeners and musicians who want synthetic music to be transparently labelled.
Which songs are banned under the new rules?
The industry body ARIA’s rules do not ban outright the use of AI in music. Neither does it have a zero-tolerance policy for AI in art. Instead, the updated code notes that a recording developed with the help of Gen AI is eligible for listing when it is “substantially human made” and “raises no stream or chart manipulation concerns.” This still leaves a lot of room for artists to create music with Generative AI tools.
In fact, ARIA CEO Annabelle Herd insisted that the chart listings should evolve to “keep room for” artists already using AI tools in their work.
“The ARIA Charts will always remain a transparent measurement of the music Australia consumes, but a chart that rewards unlicensed AI output would undercut the very basis of the recorded music we exist to represent,” she said.
What penalties will users and distributors face?
ARIA has stated that it may reject ineligible recordings, apart from excluding them and removing them from charts whenever needed, adjusting chart positions, withdrawing accreditations, or rescinding its awards.
But when considering the global music industry as a whole, there is not much punitive action that original music artistes and producers can take against users making AI-generated versions of their songs. The optics of a world-famous singer suing a small creator over an AI remix do not favour the true creators.
Instead, musical artistes and the companies representing them have been taking AI music generation platforms such as Suno and Udio to court, accusing them of using copyrighted works without permission.
In late August, music publishers including Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappel sued Anthropic, as well as its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging digital piracy and the data harvesting of copyrighted works.
Anthropic disagreed with the claims and intends to defend itself in court, reported TechCrunch.
Scraping copyrighted content to build AI is still a grey area. However, the 2025 ruling against Anthropic in the authors’ lawsuit that ended in a landmark $1.5 billion settlement made one thing clear: that U.S. courts may take a more serious view of AI companies pirating copyrighted content for AI development.
Will music platforms be held accountable for AI?
To truly exclude AI-generated music from human creations, even casual listeners need a reliable way to differentiate between the two at first glance. For this, transparent labelling standards are required across streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.
Later this month, Spotify users can expect to see “AI Persona” labels that identify artists who were entirely created with AI. In addition to this, Spotify will not include AI Personas in listeners’ editorial or algorithmic recommendations.
The labels will depend on both self-disclosure as well as the platform’s own checking process. Users will also be able to learn if the artist self-disclosed their AI status, or if Spotify had to apply the label.
While this label applies to AI artists, the platform has features such as AI Credits and SongDNA in order to understand if specific tracks were created with AI.
But more users are asking for ways to filter AI-generated or AI-assisted music entirely. A spike in unlabelled AI song tracks on platforms such as Instagram makes it difficult for creators to curate background music for their videos and photos. For example, art-based businesses marketing handmade goods to buyers can face flak over accidentally using AI music in their Reels. To take down and re-upload the Reel would cost them views.
Challenges exist offline as well. Music lovers and connoisseurs have complained that AI soundtracks are seeping into more public spaces, as commercial properties such as stores and cafés err on the side of caution by choosing generic AI music over popular licensed tracks they may need to pay for.
Published – September 04, 2026 08:24 am IST
