No Studio, No Label, No Training: How Joseon Hip-Hop Cracked Melon's Top 100 With AI

When Joseon Hip-Hop's Maeum-ui Sup ("Forest of the Heart") climbed to number 89 on Melon's Top 100 in recent months, it marked something the Korean music industry had not quite seen before: a song composed and performed by AI, written by a man who runs a café, charting alongside releases from some of the country's most heavily resourced idol groups. The broader context is that Melon's Top 100 has long functioned as a near-impenetrable ceiling for anyone outside the major-label system, making the entry a quiet signal that AI-assisted music has moved past background noise.

The creator behind the track

Joseon Hip-Hop is the stage name of a solo creator who spent years in the food-and-beverage industry before stumbling into generative AI. He originally began studying tools like Claude and Gemini to promote his café, noticed that AI music generation had become viable, and launched a YouTube channel under the name Joseon Hip-Hop in January of this year. The name itself was a deliberate choice: he already liked hip-hop, and felt that adding the word Joseon, an older name for Korea, gave it a playful, familiar quality.

Maeum-ui Sup was not originally intended for public release. He had written it as a submission to an AI music video competition. After writing the lyrics himself, he fed prompts into Suno, a generative music AI, which handled the composition and vocal performance, a soft female voice over an unhurried, accessible melody. The words, in his own description, were meant to reassure rather than motivate: the song tells its listener that they have worked hard enough and are allowed to rest. "I think the public responded to lyrics that weren't telling them to do more," he said in an interview on the 11th at a café in Seoul's Gangnam district, "but instead patting them on the back and saying it's okay to take a break."

He also noted that the 100-to-110 range on Melon is considered one of the hardest brackets to escape upward from. Breaking through it, he said, felt genuinely satisfying.

Who is actually listening

One detail in the streaming data stands out: 38% of Maeum-ui Sup's Melon listeners are in their 40s, ahead of listeners in their 30s (33%) and well ahead of the 20-something demographic (11%) that drives most K-pop consumption. Joseon Hip-Hop has pointed to this as evidence of a structural gap in the current industry. Because major entertainment companies are primarily oriented around idol music, he argues, there is relatively little being made for older listeners. His production costs are close to zero, which means he can attempt a wider range of styles and emotional registers without the commercial pressure that shapes label releases.

That low-cost model also came with a notable early break. G-Dragon liked three posts on the Instagram account connected to his YouTube channel, which was enough to generate mainstream attention. As of the 13th, the channel has more than 170,000 subscribers.

How he actually works now

The Maeum-ui Sup workflow was fully prompt-driven, Suno handled everything from composition to vocals. But his process has since shifted. Suno now accounts for roughly 30 to 40 percent of a given track. He writes the lyrics himself, uses Suno to generate the top-line melody, and then hands the rest, instrument selection, beat production, arrangement, mastering, to human collaborators. Music videos are produced using Vidu 2.5, a generative video AI. He releases new tracks about three times a week.

He is also in the process of planning a remake project in which a human vocalist would re-record Maeum-ui Sup, and says he wants to expand into music production more broadly. His songs are currently distributed across Korean platforms including Melon, Bugs, and Genie, as well as YouTube Music and Spotify internationally. He has also produced branded songs for corporate clients and collaborated with government bodies including the Overseas Koreans Agency and the North Chungcheong Police Agency.

One thing he does not receive, however, is songwriter royalties. Under current Korean law, AI-assisted music is not eligible for copyright registration, so any income from streaming comes through neighboring rights, the rights held by a producer or distributor, rather than authorship royalties. He has said he hopes that will change: "I'd like to see the human creative elements recognized for copyright."

The industry's response

The royalty gap is not purely an economic complaint; it has become a regulatory flashpoint. In July, six major Korean music industry bodies, including the Korea Music Copyright Association (KMCA), the Korea Entertainment Producers Association, and the Korea Music Performers' Union, issued a joint call for proposals to adopt an AI detection program capable of identifying whether a given track was AI-generated or AI-assisted. The selection process is now in its final stage.

The move comes after a notably unsteady few months at the KMCA itself. Last month, the association announced a conditional policy that would have allowed AI-assisted music to be registered under certain circumstances; it reversed that decision 22 days later. The Korea Board of Audit and Inspection had earlier flagged the issue in March, noting that 60% of songs registered by 29 individuals who had each submitted more than 200 tracks in 2024 showed signs of AI involvement, a finding that added urgency to the question of what detection and registration standards should look like.

The detection challenge is significant. Unless a creator voluntarily discloses that AI was involved, there is currently no reliable way to identify it in a finished track.

What other countries are already doing

The international picture is uneven but moving. The Beatles used AI in 2023 to isolate John Lennon's voice from an unreleased demo, releasing Now and Then as a result. Korean duo DEUX used similar AI voice-restoration technology to release a track featuring the late Kim Sung-jae's voice in November of last year, the group's first new material in 28 years. Outside of Korea, a song composed with Suno by an artist called Inga Rose reached number one on iTunes charts in the United States and several other countries after gaining traction on TikTok.

In the United States, BMI, one of the country's main music rights organizations, already has a working framework. It permits registration for works created entirely by humans, works where AI was used as an assistive tool, and works where AI contributed only a portion of the output. What it does not permit is registration for tracks produced entirely through prompt input, with no human musical contribution to the composition or lyrics. Germany operates under broadly similar principles.

Korea's KMCA has said it intends to develop its own standards through public consultation. Given that Maeum-ui Sup was initially a fully prompt-generated track, the category that would be excluded even under BMI's framework, the line between what qualifies and what does not will matter a great deal to creators like Joseon Hip-Hop, whose process has since moved closer to the hybrid model that other countries are already prepared to recognize.