Australia's most played song on radio this week draws AI criticisms

Madonna has released a critically acclaimed and catchy new album, but not one of the songs from Confessions II has yet made it onto Australia's charts.

Instead, a cover of her 1989 song Like a Prayer is one of the country's hottest tracks.

But the track, released by Queensland-based DJ and producer Josh Fawaz, has angered some in the music industry who believe it was produced with artificial intelligence-powered audio engineering software.

ABC News has contacted Fawaz multiple times this week to seek his response to the criticism, but he has not responded.

Confessions II is expected to make a strong debut on the Billboard charts, and is likely to chart in Australia too.

Samantha Bennett, professor of music at the Australian National University and chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, can see the irony that Like a Prayer is at the top of the charts in Australia instead of one of Madonna's new songs.

"I would say that that's quite ironic that she releases this album of new material and some of it is quite complex and it's got a lot of depth to it," Professor Bennett said.

"And yet a track that is now 40 years old for her … is now, through a cover version, getting 14 million views on YouTube."

Chart topping

Fawaz's cover of Like a Prayer is the No.1 song on the national radio airplay charts in Australia.

These charts measure song data from all 54 commercial radio stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Adelaide, Perth, the Central Coast, Newcastle and Geelong, plus triple j and Sydney community station FBi.

It is also No.1 on the RCS Media Monitors Top 10 National Songs chart, which measures song data from the last seven days.

The song has reached the No.4 spot on the ARIA Top 20 Australian Singles chart, No.4 on the ARIA Top 20 Dance Singles chart and No.19 on the ARIA Top 20 New Music Singles chart.

His album Dance Like Nobody's Watching is No.19 on the ARIA Top 20 Australian Albums chart.

The ARIA Charts are determined by how Australians consume music each week, an ARIA spokesperson told the ABC.

"They combine physical sales, digital downloads and streaming activity from all major platforms into one aggregated view," the ARIA spokesperson said.

"[This makes] them the only measure of across-the-board music consumption in Australia for any given week."

'Feels like cheating'

Music producer Mitch Thomas, who goes by the stage name Needs No Sleep, has been criticising Fawaz's suspected use of AI music production tools on his social media accounts.

The most popular of these web-based workstations allows users to create songs including vocals, lyrics and instrumentation from text prompts or uploaded audio.

He told ABC News the biggest issue was how AI music was made.

"The software isn't just generating music out of nothing," Thomas said.

"It's been trained on a dataset of music and that music is going to comprise copyrighted material by artists who didn't consent for their music to be trained upon."

Thomas does not believe there is space for AI music in the ecosystem.

"It just kind of feels like cheating," he said.

"We dislike when people use steroids and cheat in competition because we acknowledge that that's unfair and I think the same is true in music.

"It's like, the best books I've ever read in my life were written by human beings.

"The artwork they hang in the Louvre in France is painted by humans, not by machines."

Fawaz responded to a social media post by Thomas, saying he used AI "as a tool" and "it's not that deep".

"I've been releasing music way before AI was invented," he wrote.

Who is Josh Fawaz?

Fawaz is an Australian DJ and electronic music producer who has been active since his debut release Bubble Goose in 2015.

He hass released club-focused versions of well-known songs and produced dance and electronic music.

Fawaz has been celebrating his success in videos posted online.

In one, he writes that he almost gave up music two months ago.

"Posting my songs online for years and nothing really happened," he writes.

"Told myself I'll give it one last try, then I'll quit.

"On the verge of giving up I posted Like a Prayer and went to sleep that night.

"But I woke up and my life was changed forever."

Madonna will still get royalties

A spokesperson for music right management organisation APRA AMCOS has confirmed that Fawaz, listed as Fadi Fawaz, has been a member of APRA and AMCOS since 2021.

But the spokesperson said Madonna and her co-writer would still get publishing royalties.

"The song Like a Prayer is a remix/cover of a musical work written by Madonna L Ciccone and Patrick R Leonard," the spokesperson said.

"As the original human rights holders of that musical work, they will be entitled to be paid all performance royalties in the usual manner.

"How that song was recorded and any rights that may or may not exist in those recordings is not something that impacts the payment of APRA and AMCOS royalties to the original human owners of the copyright in the underlying musical work performed."

According to APRA AMCOS, a recorded song has two forms of copyright. One is for the underlying composition, the other for the recording.

'Outrage' justified

Chief scientist at UNSW's AI Institute Toby Walsh said the music industry had a right to be "outraged" about AI-generated songs, given it was already so hard for artists in Australia to make a living.

"It adds salt into the wound," Professor Walsh said.

"Because, of course, how did these AI tools that make the music get created?

"They got created by stealing everyone's work and ingesting them and building the new AI models based upon all of these human artists' work, much of it taken without consent or compensation.

"So, we should continue to be outraged.

"The tech companies have built these tools without engaging with the creators, without whom the tools would not exist."

Calls to label AI music

Professor Bennett said AI-produced songs were now a fact of life in popular culture and part of a long continuum of the digitalisation of music.

"I think that AI music needs to be clearly labelled as such," Professor Bennett said.

"If radio [stations] are going to play music generated by AI, then it needs to be announced so that people know.

"I think there needs to be a different labelling process for AI-generated music so that people actually know what it is that they're listening to, and they can support artists who are living in the real world … and they can support real artists, human artists in that knowledge."

She said, however, that the horse had bolted and that AI being in musical workflows was not a new idea.

"Automated mixing and mastering plug-ins have been around for years,"

Professor Bennett said.

"You can automatically blend different musical instruments and musical tracks into a cohesive whole.

"The Eventide Harmonizer; you could look at something like that from the late 70s and think, that sort of creates the effect that there's two or three voices where there's only one, and we think we're listening to sort of more like a chorus than we are a singular voice."