Australian musicians including Kylie Minogue, John Farnham, INXS, Midnight Oil, AC/DC, Tones and I, Gotye, Ben Frost, Nick Cave, Tame Impala, Parkway Drive, The Living End, and Vance Joy have had their songs included in a database of 12 million tracks used to train artificial intelligence systems. The database, which lists songs available on YouTube, is used by AI to recognize and generate music. Australia's presence in these databases is substantial, with Kylie alone contributing 182 songs in one dataset.
Industry Anger Over AI Music Generation
The volume of Australian music used to train AI has provoked significant anger in the local music industry, especially given that AI platforms like Suno generate as much new music as Spotify's entire catalog every two weeks. Dobe Newton, co-writer of the folk classic "I Am Australian" and a member of the Bushwackers, whose music is in the databases, stated there is "no real ethical nor moral underpinning" to current AI music practices. Jesse Pattinson of The Delta Riggs expressed concern about "the opportunity it will take away from real artists."
Screen composer and APRA board member Caitlin Yeo told the author she holds "deep concern for the future of music made by humans for humans." She described feeling "violated" upon discovering her work in these databases, realizing decades of her work had been "hoovered up in a second" to "feed companies offshore that pay no taxes."
Copyright Law Challenges
While Australian artists feel ripped off, the intersection of copyright law and AI makes proving infringement extremely difficult. Lawsuits across creative industries have covered how copyrighted books, speeches, and even pornography have been used to train AI models, leading to massive settlements. In 2025, AI company Anthropic paid US$1.5 billion to writers who brought a class action lawsuit over the use of a database of over 7 million books to train its AI.
However, proving copyright infringement for music is harder than for books. Crucially, the databases often do not contain copyrighted material itself; instead, they contain instructions on where to download the data and associated information to aid AI training. Previous lawsuits found that simply listing where copyrighted material can be found is not, by itself, copyright infringement. The infringement only occurs when an AI company uses the data to train its model. As one analogy puts it: having a map to a safe filled with gold is fine; stealing the gold is when the law is broken.
Music-Specific Legal Hurdles
This legal battlefield is complicated by the unique nature of music law. Copyright protects specific expressions, such as a distinct melody or recording, but not a general style. AI developers exploit this loophole by extracting underlying patterns, chord progressions, and vocal textures to create a pastiche rather than copying note-for-note. To a creator, this feels like theft, but in the eyes of the law, it may be imitation.
Legal challenges are not impossible. The German music royalties society successfully sued OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT. Universal and Sony, representing over 50% of the music industry, have sued Suno for infringing the copyright of more than 60,000 songs, following other cases against AI giant NVIDIA and Suno. In response, Suno described its platform as a fair-use training model, stating "learning is not infringing."
Industry Response and Future Prospects
Since artists became aware of these datasets, the international music industry has rapidly coalesced around several class action lawsuits and lobbying efforts. In Australia, 4,000 artists signed a petition calling on the government to increase protections for artists, and artists held a press conference in Canberra to discuss AI's impact. Tech lobbyists are arguing for exemptions from Australian copyright law, while the Australian Strategic Policy Institute argues that copyright law is a "strategic liability" that increases Australia's reliance on foreign AI models.
There is a fierce tension between fostering innovation and protecting creative industries. However, Australia does not have to choose between the two. The European Union's AI Act forged an alternative path: from next August, all AI models accessed within the EU must declare the source of their training data and comply with local copyright laws, no matter where the AI was built. These laws may break the veil of secrecy surrounding AI data usage and significantly increase the likelihood of artists being paid when their work is included in AI models.
As Caitlin Yeo told the author, artists "should see a slice of the pie too." The cultural heartbeat of Australia depends on supporting creatives, and joining or drawing inspiration from the EU's AI legislation could help protect artists and ensure they are fairly represented regarding AI works derived from their labour.
