When Meomuru released ‘Have You Become the Adult You Dreamed Of?’ in June, it began as a rock ballad about the distance between childhood ambitions and adult life. By early October, the song was still among the top 20 on Melon’s TOP100.
It then found a larger audience as background music in short-form videos on South Korean social media. Earlier this week, the single climbed to No. 2 on Melon’s Top 100, South Korea’s flagship streaming chart.
The rise caught listeners off guard because the track’s vocals were generated entirely by artificial intelligence. Its popularity has made Meomuru one of the country’s most-talked-about acts.
Behind Meomuru are Lee Yong-seok and Choi Sung-hyuk, songwriters and producers who make up the duo Glorywave and have worked with South Korean artists for more than a decade. Glorywave created the song using Suno, a generative AI music platform, for its melody, arrangement and vocal track.
Meomuru wrote the lyrics and directed the overall production, while Glorywave edited, mixed and mastered the final version. Meomuru said: “To me, AI is a modern instrument and a partner that helps bring my imagination into reality.”
The act also said: “I believe that while the tools may change, the stories do not.”
The chart success arrives as the rules governing AI-made work remain unsettled. South Korea’s current copyright framework protects creative contributions by people, while material generated solely by AI is not itself recognised as able to be copyrighted.
The Korea Music Copyright Association introduced criteria in August that would have allowed AI-assisted works to be registered when a human had played “a substantive and leading role” in making them. It withdrew those criteria 22 days later, saying sufficient social consensus had yet to be reached.
Glorywave has not registered the song for royalty management with the Korea Music Copyright Association, known as KOMCA. The number of AI related registrations across music, video and publishing nevertheless rose from one in 2023 to 18 in 2024, 367 in 2025 and 1,054 in the first eight months of 2026, according to Korea Copyright Commission data.
Shin Ji-young, an executive at Melon operator Kakao Entertainment, told a National Assembly discussion that music services did not have a way to resolve copyright payments themselves.
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