An Australian song hit No 1 on radio. Now people are asking if AI made it.
Josh Fawaz's cover of 'Like a Prayer' climbed to the top of Australia's national airplay chart. Music experts say it sounds like generative AI produced it, not a human.
Key points
- Josh Fawaz's cover of Madonna's 'Like a Prayer' reached No 1 on Australia's National Radio Airplay chart in 2024.
- Music experts and working musicians publicly question whether the track was made using generative AI, the technology that can produce audio, images, and text from simple instructions.
- Fawaz went from a little-known artist to a viral name within months, driven partly by thousands of radio spins.
- No verified independent analysis has yet confirmed or ruled out AI involvement in the track's production.
Josh Fawaz was, until recently, an obscure Australian producer. Then his cover of Madonna's 1989 classic 'Like a Prayer' started getting played. A lot. It reached the top spot on the National Radio Airplay chart, the tally of how many times a song gets broadcast across Australian stations each week.
Now the song is at the centre of a dispute that goes well beyond one artist's career.
Music industry figures and fellow musicians are raising a pointed question: did a human actually make this? The concern, reported by The Guardian, is that the track may have been produced using generative AI, software that can compose, arrange, and mix music without a person playing a single note or singing a single word. You feed it a prompt, and it builds you a song.
If that claim holds up, it matters for two reasons.
First, radio stations counted those plays the same as any human-made recording. Chart positions shape which artists get label deals, touring opportunities, and public attention. A track that quietly skips the human creative process but still collects the same rewards raises serious fairness questions for musicians who spent years developing their craft.
Second, there is currently no standard rule in Australia, or most other countries, requiring artists or labels to declare when AI tools made a meaningful contribution to a recording. Listeners, radio programmers, and chart compilers had no way of knowing, if the allegations are correct.
None of that means Fawaz is guilty of anything illegal. Generative AI tools sit in a legal grey area in most music markets right now. Using them is not automatically fraud or copyright infringement, though that is being argued in courts across multiple countries as labels sue AI music companies.
What experts are calling for is transparency: a simple, consistent label, the way food packaging lists ingredients. You would know what you were listening to.
What does this mean for people who listen to the radio?
For now, it means very little day-to-day. You can still enjoy the song. But it does suggest that charts and airplay counts, metrics the industry has always treated as signals of genuine human popularity, may need new rules to stay meaningful.
The Australian music industry has not yet announced any formal review of how AI-generated or AI-assisted content is handled on the airplay chart. That conversation, though, is now very hard to avoid.
