A Suno song hit No. 89 on Melon's Top 100, and its creator collects no songwriting royalties

A song made with Suno entered Melon’s Top 100 on September 6, 2026, peaked at No. 89, and dropped off 2 days later. Melon is South Korea’s biggest home-grown streaming service, and Korean outlets call a Top 100 entry a hard ceiling even for established K-pop groups. The track, “Forest of the Heart”, came from a YouTube channel called Joseon Hiphop with more than 175,000 subscribers, and it was released back in May for an AI music video contest.

It was not a one-off. As of September 13, three more Joseon Hiphop songs were sitting on Melon’s Hot 100, the chart that ranks music released in the past 30 to 100 days by hourly listening: “As I Lived…”, “A Well Called Heart”, and “Just Do It”.

What Joseon Hiphop wrote, and what Suno generated

The split matters here, and the Korean coverage splits on it too. The Korea Herald calls the track AI-generated. SBS calls it AI-assisted, and reports that the creator wrote the lyrics first, then entered prompts into Suno for the composition and the vocals.

A human wrote the words. A model performed them. That is the same shape as most of the tracks I see charting on the SIQA AI music charts, and it is why “AI song” keeps failing as a label: it collapses a written lyric and a generated vocal into one word.

The creator’s own read on why it connected is about the writing, not the model.

“

I think people enjoy the lyrics, because rather than telling them what to do, the lyrics tell them it's okay to rest after all they've been through.

A remake is already in progress, with a human singer set to record “Forest of the Heart”. The song outgrew the tool that made it, which is a very old story wearing new clothes.

Why the chart entry pays the recording but not the writing

South Korea has a clean split between 2 kinds of music money, and this song only touches one of them. The Korea Music Copyright Association, KOMCA, collects for the writing: the melody, the lyrics, the arrangement. Streaming services also pay the side that owns the recording itself, which in Korea gets called neighbouring rights.

KOMCA does not register music made with AI, so Joseon Hiphop collects the recording-side payment and nothing for the writing, even on the lyrics a human typed.

KOMCA had a fix for exactly this gap, and it lasted 22 days. On August 3, 2026 it began registering AI-assisted songs where the applicant played a substantial and leading role in the writing, composing, or arranging, with prompt records and project files as proof. Lawmakers objected, the culture ministry wrote to KOMCA on August 18 asking for wider public debate, and the board voted the rules away on August 25.

The first AI-assisted song to reach Melon’s Top 100 charted 12 days after the country withdrew the mechanism that would have paid its writer.

Who actually streamed it: Melon’s 40-somethings, not teenagers

The audience data is the part I did not expect. Listeners in their 40s made up 38% of the song’s Melon audience, with 33% in their 30s and 11% in their 20s. The demographic most likely to be described as resistant to AI music is the one streaming it.

That reads less like novelty listening and more like a song finding people at the age where “it’s okay to rest” lands hardest. Melon’s own scale gives the number weight. Tracker data put Melon at roughly 6.44 million monthly users in 2026, second in Korea behind YouTube Music.

Chart bodies elsewhere have picked the opposite approach to the one Korea’s charts are taking by default. Australia’s ARIA blocked fully AI-generated recordings from its official charts from August 31, and IFPI Finland did the same on its national chart. Melon let the song in, and then Korea’s copyright system declined to pay for half of it.