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. 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. This still leaves a lot of room for artists to create music with Generative AI tools. 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. 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. 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.
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. “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.
