Inside Melon's Top 100: an AI-composed Track Whose Lyricist Got Zero Royalties

Source: Hankyoreh — 'Human lyrics, AI composition' Joseon Hip-hop's 'Forest of the Mind' entered Melon's Top 100; lyricist earns zero royalties

An AI-composed track entered Melon's Top 100, South Korea's leading music streaming platform, in early September.

Its lyrics were written by a person; its composition and vocals were generated by Suno. The lyricist did not receive author's royalties on the song, and was compensated only through neighboring rights as a sound-recording producer because the composition and vocal performance were AI-generated.

Services like Suno let a user submit lyrics or a description of the desired genre and mood, and generate a full track with vocals and instrumentation. "Write a jazz piano piece for a cool, bright autumn day" is a typical prompt. Creators sometimes use the output as-is, and sometimes rework the lyrics or arrangement afterward. The producers behind this track have said that on later releases, they took a more hands-on role in arrangement and post-production.

This is not a technical gap but an attribution gap. Payment and distribution require a determination of which portion of a work constitutes human authorship, and that standard the Korean market does not yet have.

Case study: outside Korea, AI-generated music is already more established. "Breaking Rust," a virtual country artist, topped Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart last year. "I'm Obliv," a UK-based AI music creator, signed with a US record label after one of his Suno tracks passed three million plays; he writes his own lyrics and iterates on prompts, producing up to 100 versions of a single song — a case where human judgment stays central even as AI does the generation.

Distinguishing AI-made music from human-made music is also becoming harder as the technology improves. In one study last year, roughly 9,000 people across eight countries were played two AI-generated tracks and one human-made track; only 3% correctly identified all three.

How the industry frames authorship is shifting too. In some markets, writing effective prompts is increasingly treated as a creative skill in its own right — not unlike how the arrival of computer-based music production let people make music without mastering a traditional instrument.

The Korea Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) proposed registration criteria for AI-assisted works last month — specifically, a framework for trust-registering the portions where a human substantively and directively created the work — then withdrew them 22 days later after the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism conveyed its view that broader public consultation on cultural and artistic matters should come first. A ministry copyright official told Hankyoreh that "recognizing AI-assisted portions as copyrightable work, and KOMCA's own criteria for collecting and distributing royalties on trust-registered works, are separate questions" that required wider input from members and the music distribution industry before KOMCA revised its rules. The ministry is expected to hold a public forum as early as this month.

A track's composition and vocals being machine-generated does not by itself erase every claim. The written lyrics are a separate, human-authored element, and neighboring rights can attach to the sound recording produced by a human actor.

The open question is where to draw the line: which part is human authorship, and who gets paid for it. Until a standard answers that, attribution lags the technology that creates the works.

Note: detection of AI involvement identifies similarity or provenance; it is not itself a legal determination of copyright ownership or the share of human contribution.

Experience how AI-involvement detection works: https://go.musicscanner.app/story

Original 'Forest of the Mind' MV — publisher's own public upload