A One-Month Thaw in Seoul: KOMCA Walks Back Its Opening for AI-Assisted Songs

Songwriters who read August headlines about South Korea opening its doors to AI-assisted music need to update their notes. On 21 September, Digital Music News reported—citing the Korea JoongAng Daily—that the Korea Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) has reversed its late-summer softening and returned to a strict line on AI-related registrations.

In August, trade coverage described KOMCA as accepting works where a human creator contributed substantial authorship and artificial intelligence played only an assistive role. By the third week of September, the society’s governing body had pulled that policy back, according to the reporting. DMN, citing the Korea JoongAng Daily, also reported that registrations finalized during the interim were canceled.

The whip-turn illustrates how fragile administrative rules remain around hybrid songwriting. A collective management organization’s registration rule is not a national statute: KOMCA’s reversal does not make creating AI-assisted music illegal in South Korea, nor does it bind every distributor or publisher in Asia. What it controls is how South Korea’s primary collection society registers works and distributes performance and mechanical royalties.

Because the full Korean-language text of KOMCA’s September decision and its transitional rules were not reproduced in the English trade report, writers with Korean catalog registrations—especially those who filed tracks during the brief August window—should verify their status directly against KOMCA’s official Korean notices before assuming a song is cleared for collection.