KOMCA now allows songs made with AI help in South Korea

South Korea's largest music copyright collective, the Korean Music Copyright Association, has ended its ban on registering songs made with artificial intelligence. Under the amended rules, which took effect Monday, August 3, KOMCA will register AI-assisted works and pay royalties on them, as long as a human creator took a substantial part in the writing, composition or arrangement.

The reversal replaces a ban that had applied since March 24, 2025, under which creators had to confirm their work was created solely through human effort, with a "0%" contribution from AI. Any use of AI at all, down to a chord-suggestion tool built into a creator's software, made a work ineligible for KOMCA registration or royalties under that rule.

Under the new system, a creator registering an AI-assisted work must tell KOMCA which parts involved AI, name the specific tools used, and describe their own creative contribution. They must confirm the work was not generated from a prompt alone, and that a human made what KOMCA calls a "substantial and leading" contribution to its melody, lyrics, structure or arrangement. Where a filing is found false, or a fully AI-generated work is found registered as human-made, KOMCA can hold royalty payments, claw back sums already paid, and terminate the creator's trust contract; where intent or gross negligence is shown, the association plans to seek a penalty of up to three times the amount wrongly received.

The reversal follows a March 2026 audit by South Korea's Board of Audit and Inspection, which 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 AI help despite the old ban, and concluded that KOMCA and ten other Korean copyright trust bodies had been registering works and paying royalties without separately checking for AI use.

KOMCA has stopped short of requiring specific paperwork upfront, but recommends creators keep material capable of evidencing their process, including digital audio workstation project files, revision histories, sheet music and prompt logs; it can request that evidence, or route a work through technical review or an internal deliberation panel, with a 30-day window for creators to respond. The rules also land alongside a broader industry push: Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group and HYBE proposed chart-eligibility principles in July that would require AI-assisted recordings to be "substantially human made" to qualify for official charts, language close to the standard KOMCA now applies to registration.

The stakes are highest for the labels whose catalogs run through KOMCA. HYBE took majority control of AI audio company Supertone in a $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 catalog of more than 7,000 K-pop songs with over 370 composers worldwide. Under the old ban, any of those songs touched by AI would have been shut out of registration and royalties entirely; under the new rules they can be registered, but only with the disclosures, and exposure to penalties, KOMCA now requires. The reversal also lands amid a wave of AI-music friction elsewhere this year, including a New York copyright case against AI firm Udio, Suno signing onto the copyright-tracking tool Sentinel, and Suno bringing its voice-cloning tool to phones.