MEOMURU AI track becomes first to top Melon chart

MEOMURU’s “Have You Become the Adult You Dreamed Of?” reached No. 1 on South Korea’s Melon Top 100 at 5 p.m. on Nov. 13, becoming the first song composed and performed using artificial intelligence to top the chart, according to Asia Business Daily. The rock ballad was released on June 23 and took about five months to reach the summit, overtaking new releases by RESCENE, A2O Light and ILLIT.

The track was not created without human input. Glorywave planned the project, while human creators developed its lyrics and overall production direction. Suno, the generative AI music service, generated the melody, arrangement and vocals; there was no human vocalist on the recording. Lee Yongseok, known as Martin East, and Choi Seonghyeok, known as Beatjaru, were part of the production team.

MEOMURU said it writes lyrics from emotions encountered in everyday life, using AI tools to turn them into melody and music. It called AI “a modern instrument and a partner that helps bring my imagination to life.” Malay Mail had reported on Nov. 1 that the song, which it called “The Adult I Dreamed Of,” had already climbed to No. 2 on Melon’s flagship chart.

The song’s theme concerns the gap between the adults people imagined becoming as children and the responsibilities they encounter in reality. Listeners in their 30s accounted for 36% of its audience and those in their 40s for 30%, or 66% combined. Listeners in their 20s made up 19%, while those in their 50s represented 11%.

The chart achievement also highlights an unsettled question over rights and royalties. The song is not registered with the Korea Music Copyright Association, or KOMCA, and Glorywave has not received standard royalties for its lyrics, composition or arrangement. Instead, the project receives separate payments through music distribution.

KOMCA announced standards in August that recognized human creative contributions in AI-made works, but later withdrew them after insufficient public discussion. The criteria would have permitted registration where humans played a substantial, leading role, amid pushback from the creative community.

An earlier KOMCA rule, in effect from March 2025, had disqualified any work with detected AI assistance from registration or royalty collection, Billboard Korea reported. A March audit by South Korea’s Board of Audit and Inspection found that 60.9% of a sample of 8,540 songs registered by 29 prominent writers, roughly 5,200 tracks, were likely made with AI assistance.

South Korea’s Copyright Act protects works with human creative input, but does not define where machine generation ends and human contribution begins. Music critic Kim Sung-hwan told Malay Mail that the central question was “the original idea behind an AI-generated song” and whether it came from a human.