Fully AI-generated songs are out, but human-made music using AI can still make the charts.
A few months ago, one of the biggest songs on Australian radio came with a pretty major asterisk.
Queensland producer Josh Fawaz’s cover of Madonna’s Like a Prayer climbed the ARIA charts and became the most-played song on Australian radio, before its Spotify credits were updated to acknowledge generative AI vocals and AI-generated drums.
Which raised the inevitable question: if a machine is doing a sizeable chunk of the performing, what exactly are the charts measuring?
ARIA has now come back with an answer.
The Australian Recording Industry Association has updated its official Charts Code of Practice, ruling that wholly AI-generated music is no longer eligible to compete on the Australian charts.
Importantly, this isn’t a blanket ban on AI.
Artists and producers can still use AI as part of the creative process, provided the finished recording is “substantially human-made.”
Using AI to shape, edit or build something is one thing. Handing over the lead vocal, core instrumentation and creative heavy lifting to a machine is another.
That makes the Fawaz situation feel less like an odd music-industry footnote and more like the warning shot.
His Like a Prayer cover landed right in the grey area the industry has been struggling to define: a human producer using significant AI-generated elements to create a track that achieved very real commercial success.
ARIA CEO Annabelle Herd said the charts still need to reflect what Australians are actually listening to, while arguing that rewarding unlicensed or wholly machine-made music undermines the human ecosystem recorded music is built on.
ARIA can now refuse entries, remove ineligible releases or retrospectively alter chart positions. Anything deemed ineligible is also out of contention for the ARIA Awards, although artists and labels can appeal and provide evidence that a work is substantially human-made.
It’s a line around authorship rather than technology.
Use the machine. Manipulate it. Fight with it until 3am if you want.
But if the machine made the song, ARIA no longer wants to pretend otherwise.
