PRS for Music will not register a fully AI-made song

The tool moment

On 29 January 2024, PRS for Music, the UK's performing and mechanical right organisation for songwriters and composers, announced a set of guiding principles on artificial intelligence, drawn from a members' survey conducted in August 2023. By October 2025 those principles had developed into a fuller policy document, PRS for Music and Artificial Intelligence, which sets out for the first time exactly which AI-involved works PRS will and will not register. For a songwriter member wondering whether a track made with generative tools can even be registered for royalties, this is the document with the answer.

What the documents show

The policy states its registration rule plainly: AI generated works, in its own wording, “cannot be registered with PRS for Music,” because, under the originality standard PRS applies, music and lyrics must be the original work of a human author. Works where AI has been used only as an assistive tool in a human-led composition process, AI Assisted Works in the document's own term, are treated differently and may qualify, depending on the extent of human contribution. The January 2024 announcement documents the survey behind the principles: 93% of members surveyed said creators should be compensated if their music trains AI, and 89% wanted AI tools to be transparent about how they generate output. Both are PRS's own figures from its own membership, not an independent or peer-reviewed study.

What stays with the musician

PRS's policy places the burden of proof on the creator: the document states it falls to the creator to ensure a work is eligible for copyright protection and, where appropriate, to evidence their contribution's extent. A member cannot rely on PRS to determine after the fact how much of a track was human-made; they have to be able to describe that division themselves at the point of registration, and PRS has said it will apply penalties for false or misleading registrations.

Judge it by listening

The distinction PRS draws between an AI Generated Work and an AI Assisted Work is, at bottom, a question about where the compositional decisions came from, which a musician can audit the same way before registering: did a person choose the chords, the lyric, the structure, with the tool assisting execution, or did the tool generate the substance of what is being claimed.

• Is this track's music and lyrics the original work of a human author, or did AI generate that content directly?
• Can the extent of human contribution to this track be evidenced if PRS or another party questions the registration?
• Does the policy's October 2025 version still reflect PRS's position, or has it been updated since retrieval?

A collecting society's registration rule is not copyright law, but it functions like a gate a songwriter has to pass through to get paid. PRS has been specific about where that gate sits: assistance is fine, authorship still has to be human.