South Korea's Korean Music Copyright Association, the body that collects songwriting royalties for composers and lyricists, has lifted its ban on registering music made with artificial intelligence. The amended rules took effect on Monday, August 3, 2026, replacing a prohibition that had been in place since March 24, 2025. Music Business Worldwide

Under the old rule, creators had to declare 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 music software — made a song ineligible for registration or royalties. Now, KOMCA will register AI-assisted works and pay royalties on them, provided a human creator took a substantial part in the writing, composition, or arrangement.

Creators registering an AI-assisted work must tell KOMCA which parts of the track involved AI, name the specific AI tools used, and describe their own creative contribution. They must confirm the work was not generated by AI from a prompt alone, and that a human made a "substantial and leading" contribution to its melody, lyrics, structure, or arrangement. KOMCA recommends keeping evidence of the creative process — project files from a digital audio workstation (the software most producers use to record and arrange music), revision histories, sheet music, and prompt logs. The association may request that evidence and can put a work through technical review or an internal deliberation panel, with 30 days for the creator to respond.

What drove the reversal was an audit. In March 2026, 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 those songs — 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. Just weeks earlier, in February, the association had joined five other South Korean music-rights bodies in a coalition demanding a ban on AI training without creator consent and clear lines between human and AI works.

The new registration rules come with teeth. A companion amendment to KOMCA's trust-management contract terms, passed at the same board meeting on July 28, sets out consequences for false filings. Where a filing is found to be false, or a fully AI-generated work is 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 revision that would let it claim a penalty of up to three times the amount wrongly received.

KOMCA's official website now carries a notice on its landing page titled, in translation, "Notice on the revision of standards for reporting and registration of AI-assisted music works," and a press item headlined "KOMCA sets new standards for AI music copyright management, codifying the rules for the first time in Korea." KOMCA

For songwriters in South Korea's music industry — the world's sixth-largest recorded-music market by revenue, according to IFPI — the shift means AI tools are no longer an automatic disqualifier from royalty collection. It also means the line between assistance and authorship will be policed by paperwork, with penalties scaled to the size of the misstep.