Australia has taken the lead in introducing a new regulation that prohibits purely AI-generated music from appearing on official music charts, and requires that the core of the creative process must be human.
Nowadays, AI-generated music is ubiquitous across major streaming platforms, and Australia has accordingly rolled out new regulations. According to the latest research statistics, among all new music released globally in July 2026, 38.5% of the works have adopted AI technology.
The Australian authorities have directly introduced new rules: music that is almost entirely AI-generated or mostly produced by AI is strictly prohibited from appearing on official music charts. All songs listed on the charts must be works centered on human creation.
The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) stated that the purpose of setting this rule is to preserve the humanistic creative essence of music. After all, AI songs are becoming increasingly prevalent, not only dominating major streaming platforms and radio stations, but even frequently breaking into major music charts, leading to increasingly obvious disorder in the industry.
Source: Generated by Doubao AI
The introduction of the new regulations stems from the huge controversy sparked by Australian DJ Josh Favaaz.
He used AI to adapt and cover Madonna's classic track "Like A Prayer", and unexpectedly, this song directly topped the ARIA Dance Singles Chart and reached second place on the overall chart.
After this incident sparked widespread complaints and doubts from netizens, Favaaz finally added relevant labels indicating AI creation to the song. On the Spotify platform alone, the play count of this AI-adapted track has exceeded 48 million, making it extremely popular.
In fact, the new regulations do not completely prohibit musicians from using AI.
In simple terms, AI can be used as an aid in the creation process, but the core must be human. The lyrics and composition of the songs must be originally created by humans, and the lead vocals and main instrument performances must all be completed by real people. Operations such as using AI to assist in song mastering and optimize sound quality are fully permitted.
Source: Generated by Doubao AI
Annabelle Herd, CEO of the Australian Recording Industry Association, explained: "Nowadays musicians already use AI tools to assist creation, and the chart rules must keep pace with the times to accommodate this reasonable use. But those AI music works that directly scrape existing singers' recordings and are generated in batches are completely different, and cannot be confused with the former."
She added: "If the charts allow these unauthorized AI finished works to dominate the rankings, the foundation of the entire human music industry will be shaken, which is the bottom line of the industry that our association has always been committed to safeguarding."
Even Dr. Dre, the gold record producer who has won the Grammy Award seven times, holds an inclusive attitude towards AI music. He said bluntly in an interview with *The New York Times* that AI is just a new tool for music production, not a threat to the industry at all.
He stated: "The people who really think AI is a threat are those whose creative abilities cannot keep up. A few days ago I was talking to people about this, and many people are resistant to AI. I told them that this is just like when drum machines and synthesizers first came out, everyone resisted at the beginning, but eventually they all became standard tools in the industry."
The introduction of the new regulations in Australia is by no means accidental. Nowadays, the presence of AI in the music industry has become so strong that it cannot be ignored.
SubmitHub, a music submission platform, conducted a large-scale survey, and the results were unexpected: nearly 40% of the new songs launched globally in July 2026 were produced with AI.
The staff used the platform's self-developed SH Labs AI detection tool to analyze more than one million songs. The data shows that 23.2% of the songs are completely generated by AI, and another 15.3% of the songs are first produced as audio by AI and then simply modified and processed by humans.
Source: Generated by Doubao AI
Jason Grishkov, founder of SubmitHub, believes that the key to the future of AI music lies in transparency, openness and truthful labeling.
Listeners have the right to know whether the work they are listening to is created by a human or by AI, and the right of final choice should be left to the listeners themselves.
Streaming giant Spotify can no longer sit back and ignore the chaos, and has started to take measures to rectify the disorder. Starting from September this year, the platform will give exclusive labels to AI virtual musicians, which will be displayed on their personal homepages, so that users can identify at a glance which singers and songs are AI-generated.
At the same time, these works with AI labels will be removed from the platform's official recommendation and algorithm recommendation pools, leaving more exposure and traffic to human musicians and original works.
In fact, as early as before, Spotify revealed that in just one year, the platform had taken down 75 million junk songs. A large number of low-quality, plagiarized, and fake AI batch-generated songs have seriously disrupted the order of the platform and the entire music market.
Many people are curious whether anyone actually listens to AI-produced songs. The answer is: not only do people listen to them, but their popularity is incredibly high, and they have even successfully entered the mainstream music market.
The viral virtual AI band "The Velvet Sundown" in 2025 is the most typical example. As soon as this psychedelic rock band settled on Spotify, it quickly gained a large number of fans, with its monthly active listeners exceeding one million, and it released two albums in just one month.
In order to disguise as a real human band, the operating team carefully created a complete set of personal settings: the names, portraits, and detailed resumes of the four band members are all available, and they claimed to the public that it is a pure four-member American human band, with a very realistic disguise.
But soon some netizens found something wrong: many people inexplicably came across their songs in the platform's recommended playlists, and the band's posters and promotional images had a strange texture, which was obviously AI-synthesized. Reddit netizens first raised doubts and exposed the suspicious points of this band.
At first, the official account of the band strongly denied it, insisting that all works were created and performed by real people with real inspiration. Finally, when they could no longer hide the truth, they publicly admitted the truth on the Spotify homepage: this band is essentially a virtual music project with human-led creativity and full-process AI production, and all songs, vocals, lyrics, and promotional materials are generated by AI.
Even after its identity was exposed, the popularity of this AI band remains high. It still has hundreds of thousands of monthly active listeners to this day, and many of its singles have exceeded one million plays.
This article is translated by Leikeji from enronews
Original link: https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/08/25/australia-bans-ai-generated-music-from-its-official-charts
This article is from "Leikeji", authorized for release by 36Kr.