South Korea‘s largest music copyright collective has ended its ban on registering songs made with artificial intelligence.
The Korean Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) will now register AI-assisted works and pay royalties on them, provided a human creator took a substantial part in the writing, composition, or arrangement.
The amended rules took effect on Monday (August 3), replacing a ban that had applied since March 24, 2025.
Under that earlier rule, creators had to confirm their work was “created solely through human creative contributions,” with what KOMCA called a “0%” contribution from AI.
Any use of AI at all – down to a chord-suggestion tool built into a creator’s software – left a work ineligible for KOMCA registration or royalties.
Under the new system, a creator registering an AI-assisted work must tell KOMCA which parts of the track involved AI, name the specific AI tools they used, and describe the creative contribution they made themselves.
They must also confirm that the work was not generated by AI from a prompt alone, and that a human made what KOMCA calls a “substantial and leading” creative contribution to its melody, lyrics, structure, or arrangement.
KOMCA has stopped short of requiring specific paperwork, but recommends that creators keep material capable of evidencing their process, including project files from their digital audio workstation, revision histories, sheet music, and prompt logs.
The association can request that evidence, and may put a work through technical review or an internal deliberation panel, with creators given a 30-day window to respond.
The consequences of a false filing are set out in a companion amendment to KOMCA‘s trust-management contract terms, passed at the same board meeting on July 28.
Where a filing is found to be false – or a work generated entirely by AI is found to have been registered as human-made – KOMCA can hold royalty payments, claw back sums already paid out, and terminate the trust contract with the creator.
Where intent or gross negligence is established, KOMCA plans a further terms revision that would let it claim a penalty of up to three times the amount wrongly received.
The reversal follows a March 2026 audit that questioned how well the old rule was working.
South Korea‘s Board of Audit and Inspection sampled 8,540 songs from 29 writers who had each entrusted more than 200 works to KOMCA in 2024.
It found that 5,200 of them – 60.9% – were likely composed with the help of AI.
The audit covered 11 Korean copyright trust bodies, and concluded they were registering works and paying royalties without separately checking for AI use.
KOMCA had initially defended the ban, arguing in March that no technology exists anywhere in the world to determine with certainty whether AI was used in a piece of music.
The association said the system therefore depends on self-reporting – the same reliance KOMCA‘s new disclosure framework is built on.
KOMCA‘s reversal is notable because, five months earlier, it had lined up against the unlicensed use of AI in music.
In February, the association joined five other South Korean music-rights bodies in a coalition that demanded a ban on AI training without creator consent, and clear lines between human and AI works.
The new framework leaves that campaign untouched: KOMCA is setting terms for registering human-led works that use AI as a tool, not the unlicensed AI the coalition was formed to fight.
The boundary KOMCA has drawn is that AI can now help make a song but still cannot be the song’s author – broadly the line the US Copyright Office set in its January 2025 guidance on AI and copyright.
The US Copyright Office held that feeding prompts to an AI model does not, on its own, make the user the author of the output, and that purely AI-generated material must be disclosed and kept out of any copyright claim.
KOMCA‘s move also lands within days of two developments in AI music law elsewhere.
On July 31, a court in Munich ruled that AI music generator Suno had infringed the copyrights of German collecting society GEMA by training its models on GEMA’s repertoire without a license.
The court ordered Suno to stop reproducing the works, disclose its revenue, and pay damages that have yet to be set.
Suno has said it will appeal.
Three days later, on August 2, the European Union‘s rules requiring AI-generated content to be labeled took effect.
KOMCA administers the copyrights in songs – the underlying compositions and lyrics – rather than in recordings, so its rules do not govern how labels make records.
But the songwriters, composers, and publishers behind almost every commercially released K-pop track register their works with KOMCA, which means its disclosure rules reach deep into the catalogs feeding HYBE, SM Entertainment, and their peers.
Both HYBE and SM have been moving quickly into AI.
HYBE took majority control of AI audio company Supertone in a USD $32 million deal in 2023, a business it moved to wind down in July 2026, and has used AI to translate vocals into multiple languages and to build the virtual group SYNDI8.
SM Entertainment has made AI central to its “NEXT 3.0” strategy, and its publishing arm, Kreation Music Rights, manages a K-pop catalog of more than 7,000 songs and works with over 370 composers worldwide.
Under the old 0% rule, any of those works touched by AI would have been shut out of registration and royalties.
Under the new one, they can be registered – but only with the disclosures, and the exposure to penalties, that KOMCA now requires.
HYBE is already among the companies pushing for industry-wide AI rules, having joined Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and others in proposing chart-eligibility principles for AI music in July.
Those principles ask that AI-assisted recordings be “substantially human made” to qualify for official charts – the same test, in different words, that KOMCA now applies to registration.
KOMCA collected 437 billion won (approximately $306 million) in licensing fees in 2024, and its registrations reach more than 110 countries through reciprocal international agreements.
For KOMCA, that reversal brings its global reach into line with the disclosure-based approach to AI now spreading across the music industry.Music Business Worldwide
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