Korea takes the AI music registration question to the National Assembly on September 22

Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said on Monday it will co-host a forum at the National Assembly on Tuesday, September 22, on how AI-assisted music should be registered, licensed and paid out. The co-hosts are the office of Rep. Kim Jae-won and the K-Music Rights Organizations Coexistence Committee, a coalition of 6 industry groups that includes the Korea Music Copyright Association, The Korea Times reported.

The ministry’s own announcement gives the theme as the current state of AI music use and the standards for judging human creative contribution. In plain terms: how much of a song a person has to have written before the paperwork accepts it.

Organisers call it the first public session to put creators, labels, lawyers and policymakers in one room on that question.

What Korean trust bodies do, and where AI-assisted songs stall

A copyright-trust organisation is the Korean equivalent of ASCAP or BMI. A songwriter files a work with it, the body licenses that work to every radio station, bar and streaming service, and the money comes back split between the named writers. Miss the first step and the other two never happen.

That is why the registration test is the whole argument. KOMCA opened registration to AI-assisted music on August 3, then pulled the rule 22 days later after the culture ministry asked for wider consultation and Kim Jae-won objected in public.

Who is speaking at the September 22 session, and what comes after it

Kim Hye-chang of the Korea Copyright Commission’s policy research bureau opens with registration standards for generative-AI works, including how other countries have drawn the line. Seol Ji-hye, a lawyer at Yulchon, follows with proposals for rewriting the trust-registration rules. Sogang University professor Park Jun-woo moderates a panel pulled from music publishing, streaming platforms, AI-detection technology and academia, and the floor opens for questions after that.

The ministry says this is the first of a series, and that a later forum takes on how the royalties get divided.

If you release AI-assisted music into Korea, nothing changes for you on Tuesday. What gets decided over the next few forums is whether your song can be filed at all, and a song that can’t be filed can’t collect. Korea is the world’s seventh-largest music market and it already has a Suno track that charted on Melon, so the test being drafted has live cases waiting for it. The same 6-group coalition co-hosting Tuesday launched a blockchain plan in March to trace AI training across rights databases, which tells you roughly where it wants this to land.