Australia Bans Generative A.I. From Official Music Charts
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
>But the track, released by Queensland-based DJ and producer Josh Fawaz, has angered some in the music industry who believe it was produced with artificial intelligence-powered audio engineering software.
> ABC News has contacted Fawaz multiple times this week to seek his response to the criticism, but he has not responded.[1]
I think Ben Lee's point in the NYTimes article is good:
> The Australian musician Ben Lee, who is known for hits like “Cigarettes Will Kill You” and “Catch My Disease,” said non-generative A.I. was used by artists in the process of music production, including for pitch correction and noise reduction. But generative A.I. and its impacts on the industry needed to be looked at more closely, he said.
> “I’m not the kind of person who is at all fundamentally opposed to technological changes in my industry,” he said. “It feels like healthy pushback is a really vital part of us looking responsibly at the way to integrate these technologies into our industries.”
I remember when autotune came out and people wanted to ban that too.
The rules seem pretty loose:
> For example, if a song’s lead vocal or key instrumental performance is generated by A.I., the track would be ineligible, ARIA said. But a human lead vocal with A.I. backing vocals would be allowed.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-10/most-played-song-in-a...
Typically it's done just to save time. The singer could do takes over and over until it's perfect, but usually if a take is 99% there, you just slightly correct it.
You can tell this is the case if you listen to live recordings, although live pitch correction also exists. Vocalists aren't perfect, even Broadway vocalists and professional opera vocalists will occasionally have pitches slightly off. The human voice is an instrument, but it's not a piano.
If I’m right, is that different from a paint splatter brush in Photoshop? It “literally generates” a splatter without you having to place every drop.
edit: to answer the second part, photoshop brushes are absolutely generative but I'm not sure they are AI.
As best as I can tell "Generative AI" is a common shorthand for "AI I don't like"
Its like being kosher. Some people choose to not eat non kosher food. I choose not to consume AI generated materials.
What if AI cures cancer? Sure, let it cure cancer. I still don't want to read it. Some other people will read it. It still hasn't cured cancer yet though.
I do use AI in my day job as SWE, not by my own choice, but forced by the industry. It does good works, but if I have a choice, yeah I really don't need to, or want to.
I am just a peasant tossed back and fro by the rich, so I know my place, and keep my head down to do whatever necessary to live, but not more. I can choose what I am being kosher about.
I think it would be great if the world has 2 economies. AI and non AI economies. The more we can identify which one is AI and which one is not, the better the outcome for people like me.
Just label it, so those that want it can seek it out.
Having a music charts that doesn't include AI generated music does not stop AI generated music.
Because the chief business model of this industry is so obviously the "drug dealer" strategy: give 'em their first hits for free and their next few hits for cheap so that they won't even blink while giving the company $200/month to basically rent their own brain back. (lol Imagine JetBrains in 2019 rolled out a super souped-up IDE for $200/month. They'd go bankrupt from the embarrassment alone. Shoot, imagine Hacker News users in 2019 talking about how they pay $200/month to do their own job. SO MANY PEOPLE would cry "MLM!!!!!")
Because there's a generation of new people growing up in a world that's progressively training them to forfeit their own capabilities to the industry that will sell their skills back to them, and every AI blog post or song that gets the limelight without protest is tacitly green-lighting this outcome.
(This is clearly happening given that Hollywood is trying to make AI actors a thing and some label cut a $3M record deal to an AI musician that's "naturally" charting on Billboard: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougmelville/2025/09/27/al-sing...)
I am only "forced" to use them as a matter of staying economically competitive against my competition, but I do find it like having a second opinion or a way to force myself to express my thoughts.
And, finally, it's good that someone (something) actually reads the specifications that I work really hard to produce ;)
I might have wanted to write all the code myself if I had infinite time, but I don't. And I want to code way more things than I have the time or mental stamina for. As it is I have to do it at home.
This feeling of being heard and understood is a driver in cult growth. And in ordinary human bonding and mating. So this seeming AI benefit carries a risk of mass movement formation and downward ratcheting social cohesion and fertility.
I worry that the most apocalyptic aspect of AI may be artificial friendship.
Now, granted, I'm an experienced software developer in my own right, and I know that sometimes you aren't giving something full attention until you need to, but my experience is that it's different than that.
You are correct that in identifying the issue - but that's a separate one from what I intended. I cannot stand sycophantic LLMs and use methods to get rid of any anthropomorphizing they do. But I feel like I'm somewhat outside as a person whose life is far more analog than most.
I just hung some laundry outside. I'll be (manually) splitting some firewood later today. HN is my ONLY social media.
These guys are satirizing it quite well. https://www.thebeaverton.com/2025/06/zuckerberg-the-average-...
I find cars useful, but I don't have a car.
Guns are useful too in certain context, I don't have a gun thankfully because I don't need to.
This is great analogy when you consider the sheer deliciousness of pork and shellfish.
Because Oxford defines it as
> an unspecified amount or number of
How do you have more than an unspecified amount?
As we are all aware LLMs aren't true intelligence and iff we ever create something like Data from Start Trek than I'd be interested in that "person"'s art.
Right now LLM generated are is just highly mutated copies of what exists. I have no interest in consuming it.
/s/ The Big Three
Also there is a huge difference between being a musician and being a composer. Bragging that you are a musician means nothing. Most musicians are terrible composers.
I don't know anybody releasing songs with BIAB, and if they are, they're possibly using it to thicken chord progressions. Early editions of BIAB didn't have some of the new solo melodist stuff.
“ No lol. We don’t need more over privileged musicians leading luxurious lives while the rest of us slave away. I’d rather support this if leads to less inequality.
No more Rihanna’s and Guy Sebastian etc”
2. You can support local artist, not the big name ones.
3. You can still create your own music without AI, by you know, picking up musical instruments, paying your local guitar teachers to teach you so he can send his kids to college. To not do so is just laziness. Full. Stop.
Let's hear this music then.... What's the guessing it's not very good.
So, in the old days you would "support (a) local artist" by buying their album and now people probably think they are supporting them by listening to them on spotify/whatever but they really are not. Your streaming dollars are almost entirely going to Rihanna and every other big artist even if you don't listen to a single song by them.
Those are the same thing
Say Bob pays a $5 subscription and listens exclusively to artist Foo, 100 song plays. Alice pays a $5 subscription and listens exclusively to artist Baz, but plays their songs a whopping 300 times.
If it was paid out per user, Foo and Baz would both get $5. But paying out based on overall listener numbers, Foo would get $2.50 and Baz would get $7.50.
Essentially, it's a zero sum game, and one artist getting a play takes away revenue from every other artist. Even if you exclusively listen to your favorite artists, the vast majority of your subscription money is going towards the top artists.
This is why Spotify is always pushing their own playlists, smart shuffle, and encouraging background listening with ambient / sleep playlists and such; the more they can shift listeners toward music they've produced themselves or have special license agreements with, the less they have to pay out to typical (i.e. smaller) artists using their platform.
I pay $5 and listen exclusively to artist A.
10 other people pay their $5 but listen exclusively to artist B.
I would expect the artist cut of artist A to be the $5 (or their cut after Spotify), aka the artist I listen to.
However the 10 other platform users have more free time so each listen to twice as much music by artist B. So my 1 hour is dwarfed by their 20 hours, and my artist would only get $2.60 (or their cut after Spotify). Overall listener plays.
Banning AI music may only protect the very same people. Perhaps AI music will mostly hurt mass-market, ad-fueled artists while leaving the little guy who toils away in live bar and night club shows untouched. It could paradoxically increase the value of human connection in music consumption.
Instead, of course the money should go to Silicon Valley mafiosi and middlemen!
Now, if AI could literally replace every musician, that would obviously be bad. But I don't think that banning it would solve the problem. If society as a whole is so against AI music that banning it is politically popular, it's because they don't like AI music to begin with - nothing to fear, then.
Copyrights do both, they protect all creatives, it’s not one or the other.
> Banning AI music many only protect the same people
How so? AI threatens publishers and copyrights holders the most. Don’t confuse big music with big tech, they’re not the same people. Maybe browse the list of AI lawsuits related to copyrights and note how many publishers there are https://ailawsuittracker.com/copyright/
Breaking the copyright system is very unlikely to leave independent artists unscathed, I believe AI is already doing significant damage to independent artists. Breaking big publishing system won’t help either, given the number of independent artists striving to break out and go big and land a publishing contract.
Is AI a bigger threat to musicians than, let's say, Spotify? That commoditized music to a degree we had never seen before. It would be fair to ask "does the world need ANY music to ever be made again?". To me, the answer is a clear YES, but the amount of music available on Spotify is so mind-boggling (I heard a "1 million new tracks a year" figure somewhere) that it already appears to be impossible for a professional musician to survive. Yet, they do. So there's something off in the assumption that AI will wipe out small musicians.
My prediction/fear is that it will remove incentives to make music "manually", and thus lead to a decline in all aspects of the music industry, starting at spending, and then continue to teachers to instrument makers to artists. And that will make music a very elitist hobby, and stifle further development. We'll get stuck in LLM variations over All I want for Last Christmas.
Down with musicians! Equality now! Give Jensen Huang a cut also!
I do use Suno to turn my real human songs into polished tracks. I'm not a good singer and in earshot ppl like my AI produced songs. Though, I go in waves of listening only to my AI stuff to being uninspired & not listening to it.
A weird thing happened to me on a recent date where i got AI Music catfished (https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/new-trend-ai-music-catfishi...). My date was catfishing not their looks but their talents as a singer / even a musician. Weird, but maybe not so weird in a few years...
I have zero idea how much this matters since I don't really think anyone views the charts to find their next song to listen to. If a song with AI vocals is good it (might) pop off, I don't think getting on the charts at that point would matter.
Which is fine, but you could just use it to fix your vocal track
I teach recording, mixing and mastering and I know it's tedious but all of it is very creative and there's art in the imperfections. Sanitizing it away may make it more appealing to the 'average' listener but you won't get actual fans that way.
It's basically BIAB on steroids.
I've written songs since high school, so having AI turn my old vocal guitar and or keyboard demos into full tracks was a fun trip down memory lane. After a few months, though, the novelty wore off and AI music started feeling totally uninspiring, even my own stuff. I canceled my Suno subscription as AI is killing my and possibly our web design/development careers.
- Chopper, probably
I think it's because it's so much sneakier, I'm usually focused on something else and listening to music and it takes me a minute to realize something's off.
AI images and videos at least, for now, I can recognize the majority of the time and they don't have that primal connection to my brain that music does.
Looked it up: yes. Yes they are.
The only people salivating at generative AI are those that do not have the skills to create without.
Behind every ai music there’s still an artist.