Tencent Music Macau summit weighs AI and piracy

Tencent Music Entertainment Group hosted the 2026 TME China Music Impact Summit in Macau on Saturday, where the discussion centred on how artificial intelligence is reshaping music rights. The event carried the theme “Music IP: Where the Future Grows” and examined the full lifecycle of music intellectual property, from creation and growth to international expansion and long-term value retention. At the summit, Cussion Pang, Tencent Music’s executive chairman, said the industry has moved quickly from debating whether Chinese music should go global to confronting a new AI-driven phase. He also said China’s music sector has grown markedly over the past decade, in part because copyright protection has become more important. Liu Hua, director of the World Intellectual Property Organization office in China, said AI can make music creation more efficient, distribution more targeted and listening more personalised. A single song can now reach global audiences in hours, she said. But Liu warned that the same tools are making infringement harder to spot. Song imitation and piracy have become more sophisticated, she said, and AI can mimic human voices and replicate artistic styles, pushing works to millions of households without rights holders even knowing. “The line between infringement and creation is blurring,” she said. She also said the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States are actively exploring ways to address AI-related music copyright problems. Yang Ming, a professor at Peking University Law School and executive deputy dean of the university’s Intellectual Property School, said plagiarism and similar infringements predate AI. Court rulings on AI-related copyright disputes vary across jurisdictions, he said, and the law will take time to mature. “We shouldn’t set technology against creators,” he said, adding that the existing copyright framework should be able to protect rights holders while still allowing new tools to benefit the industry. Taiwanese lyricist Yi Jiayang offered a more reflective note. “Love is an antique of time,” he said, adding that creators are “both great and small” and that nobody knows how long songs will endure. Even AI-generated songs might one day become classics, he said, but creators still need to stay true to their craft and have “a fortress that protects creators”. A WIPO Magazine article published in April 2025 said China’s first Copyright Law took effect in 1991 and has since been amended in 2001, 2010 and 2020. It said the government’s 2021 outline for building a powerful intellectual property nation set copyright protection goals through 2035. That article also described the 2005 Jianwang campaign against online piracy, the 2017 push by China’s copyright authorities for fair licensing and against exclusive deals, and a digital music market that moved toward licensed distribution. It said low remuneration for creators remains a problem as digitalisation and AI spread, and that musicians often transfer rights to recording companies, which then negotiate licensing deals with streaming services such as Tencent Music Entertainment. It said Tencent Music owns QQ Music, Kugou Music, Kuwo Music and WeSing, and that it reported revenue of 7.02 billion yuan in the third quarter of 2024. It also said it was not clear how much of that revenue is passed on to musicians. Elsewhere in China’s copyright policy, the National Copyright Administration said in July 2025 that it had issued opinions on accelerating the high-quality development of the copyright industry, covering creation, use, protection, management and services across the whole chain. It said the framework was meant to help build copyright rules suited to new technologies such as AI and big data. The wider policy debate is not confined to China. The U.S. Copyright Office said it launched an AI initiative in early 2023, published a notice of inquiry in August that year and received more than 10,000 comments by December 2023. It has since been issuing a multipart report on copyright and artificial intelligence, with Part 2 addressing the copyrightability of outputs created using generative AI.