DJ behind Australia’s most-played song faces claims he used artificial intelligenceHe was “on the verge of giving up” before his cover of a Madonna classic exploded, topping Australia’s charts. Now this DJ is facing an explosive allegation.Heath Parkes-Hupton@heath_parkes7 min readJuly 14, 2026 - 10:09AMAn artist behind the most-played song on Australian radio is facing questions about whether artificial intelligence (AI) was used to help make his songs that are gaining millions of streams.Brisbane DJ Josh Fawaz’s cover of Madonna classic Like A Prayer has led the national radio airplay charts since mid-June and has been in the top five since May.Data from all 54 commercial radio stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Adelaide, Perth, Central Coast, Newcastle and Geelong showed it was played 1048 times between July 2 and 8.The two-minute club track hit number one on the ARIA dance singles as of Monday, and has also racked up 37 million streams on Spotify and 15 million views on YouTube since being uploaded on April 15.The credits for Like A Prayer list the original songwriters Patrick Leonard, Pierre Bordacarre and Madonna, and Fawaz is listed under legal name Fadi as the producer and performer.No vocalist is credited on his version of the song, despite the hit track featuring a distinctly robotic voice for Madonna’s iconic lyrics.Others you may likenewsnewsBrisbane DJ and producer Josh Fawaz. Picture: SuppliedHe has enjoyed a remarkable rise in popularity. Picture: SuppliedFawaz recently addressed the claims on social media in a response to music producer Mitch Thomas, who performs under Needs No Sleep, who has been criticising his alleged use of AI tools since May.“Stop having a little sook buddy, just be better – this is the second time you’ve posted about me, I use ai as a tool it’s not that deep, iv (sic) been releasing music way before AI was invented,” Fawaz wrote on June 23.“What I care about it providing my listeners with good music. Maybe you should do the same. Have fun with your issue.”In a video posted to Instagram on May 25, Mr Thomas said he had been sent the song and having analysed it he was “almost certain” that AI was used. “It’s completely over for music producers,” he told his followers.Brisbane DJ and producer Josh Fawaz clapped back at Mitch Thomas aka Needs No Sleep. Picture: SuppliedHe compared the track to another song by US producer MK, claiming the frequencies shown when breaking it down into stems showed signs of AI production.“The first (thing) that gives it away that it’s AI is if you put an EQ (equaliser) on it … you’ll see at 20,000 hertz there’s no frequencies. They’ve been cut off.”Mr Thomas said that tells him that a program like Suno may have been used to generate the sounds.“And Suno is trained by mostly music from Spotify which is low quality, so all the MP3 rips, everything that it’s trained itself on has all these artefacts in it that when it reproduces sound it’s going to keep those same artefacts.“So the fact this is the WAV version … being a higher form of audio over MP3, tells me that this was made with AI.”He went on to say he would offer a full apology if he was wrong, adding the “deeper issue” at play was the loss of artistry and the creative process in music.“When you can just type a prompt . and it generates a whole song, it defeats the whole purpose,” he said.News.com.au ran the Like A Prayer cover through AI detector website SubmitHub, with its analysis finding “strong AI characteristics detected”.Its spectral analysis – or a breakdown of the songs components – claimed the likelihood it was “pure AI” to be 78 per cent.A SubmitHub analysis of the Josh Fawaz song Like A Prayer appears to show likelihood of AI. Picture: SuppliedReddit users have also questioned how the song was made, and whether the public was now accepting of AI music on the radio.In early June Fawaz made posted to his social media saying he was “about to give this music stuff up” only a few months ago, before the major success of Like A Prayer.“Posting my songs online for years and nothing really happened,” he wrote. “Told myself I’ll give it one last try, and then I’ll quit.“On the verge of giving up I posted Like A Prayer and went to sleep that night. But I woke up and my life was changed forever.”News.com.au has contacted Fawaz and talent company Hallwood for comment.Being a cover song, Madonna would still gain the majority of royalties made from the song.Fawaz’s new 14-song album Dance Like Everyone’s Watching also includes covers of well-known hits such as TLC’s No Scrubs, Wonderwall by Oasis and Stevie Wonder’s iconic Signed, Sealed, Delivered.Most songs on the album are credited to the original writers with Fawaz as the producer and sole performer, but no vocalist is named, per Spotify’s view credits feature.Explosion of AI musicEach day on the biggest platform for making AI-generated music, Suno, about seven million songs are created.To put that in perspective, in two weeks there were more songs made on just one platform than Spotify’s entire back catalogue.Professor Andrew Cullen from the University of Melbourne said AI music was “endemic’ although many of these songs are made for fun or personal use.“From what I’ve seen, about 1 per cent of AI-generated songs appear to be uploaded (to streaming sites),” he said.Music icon Madonna would be making the lin’s share of earnings from the song. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFPThe School of Computing and Information Systems expert said some streamers, like Spotify, had no issue with AI music being uploaded, and the chance of making money was an incentive for people using the tech to make music.“There are generative songs up on the platform that are kind of like rip offs of original songs,” he said.“And so you might be looking for something a little bit more obscure on Spotify, and somebody might have uploaded an AI-generated duplicate of it to try and capture the royalty revenue from that song, rather than going to the original artist. Suno is an AI platform that creates music from any prompt you give it. Picture: Supplied“And so that’s a big challenge for the platforms at the moment, is to try and work out … who are the original artists in songs, who deserves to get royalty payments? “And also, if AI-generated music is something that they actually want on their platforms altogether.”Copyright fight in AustraliaIt comes as a wider debate about AI and copyright rages in Australia, with artists across the nation’s $60 billion creative industries pushing for greater protection and renumeration for their works used to train AI models.Author Anna Funder told Sky News on Monday the federal government needed to stand up to the big tech companies trying to avoid paying a fair price to artists.The Australian government has faced lobbying to give AI firms immunity from copyright laws, but has so far pushed back on a proposed text and data mining exemption.Ms Funder said creatives did not want the AI industry to bypass Australia but said their work had already been “hoovered up” at a mass scale.“What we are saying is, ‘please come to the table, we’re ready to negotiate licenses’,” she said. “You want our work … you know what you’ve got, we just want you to come to the table and pay for it like any license holder.“They haven’t come to the table … they’ve come to Canberra with lots of money and lots of pressure and spoken to government. But they haven’t come to rights holders.”Australian author Anna Funder at Parliament House calling on the Albanese government to uphold copyright law against AI companies. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.Prof Cullen told news.com.au when it came to AI-generated songs, the problem was not necessarily that no human creativity was used but that the models relied on stolen works.“There’s no way to generate music at the moment from an AI platform without listening to thousands and thousands and thousands of tracks,” he said.“And the AI platforms don’t deny this but the question really, that is now being kind of resolved in the courts, is does this amount to copyright infringement or is this just the equivalent of listening to a song by any kind of any random person?”Should AI music be labelled?Peak music body the Australian Recording Industry Association, better known as ARIA, last week welcome a global labelling system that would make it clear if and how generative AI was used to make a song.The system would use simple icons to note AI use, with “AI-Generated” songs to be classified as when primary or all creative elements of a track were made artificially.“AI-Assisted” labels would apply when a recording was largely human made, but generative AI was used for some elements.“Australian music fans, like fans everywhere, deserve to know how the music they love has been made,” chief executive Annabelle Herd said.ARIA chief Annabelle Herd said people deserved to know if music was AI or not. Picture: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images“This is a practical, proactive step by the global music community to give them that clarity.“As artists find new ways to use these tools, and as fully AI-generated tracks arrive on streaming services in growing numbers, honest labelling helps listeners make informed choices and keeps human creativity at the centre of our industry.”There was recently outrage from musicians in Sydney who discovered they were sharing a bill with an AI artist at a gig in the live music hub of Newtown.It prompted an apology from the booking agency and venue, Good Intent and Bootleggers, who said they “have never knowingly, and will never, book people who use AI to generate music”.Prof Cullen said knowing what components of a song were made with AI was “impossible” without the musicians disclosing it.He said another dilemma that was hard to answer was whether something was still “AI slop” if people enjoyed it.More CoverageBand forced to share bill with AI ‘musician’Alex BlairFacebook feeds turn to ‘slop’ as millions fleeFrank Chung“One of the song streaming platforms did a study last year, where they found 90 per cent of people doing a comparison between an AI-generated song and a human song couldn’t confidently pick out the AI-generated song,” he said. “So that is kind of the power of the song-generation platforms, that they are producing music that is quite realistic. It’s quite close to kind of human-generated content.“It’s really a question of do we as listeners want to listen to that, even if they resonate with it, even if it works? How people actually feel about it when they’re told it’s AI-generated seems to change perspectives quite a bit.”More related storiesToursLegendary rocker drops surprise Aussie newsOne of the hardest working rock stars is heading back for his second tour in two years, and this time he’s bringing a famous Aussie singer.Read moreMusic‘F*** that’: Singer slams toxic masculinityAdam Lambert discusses writing break-up songs knowing his ex would hear them – and why he is ‘nowhere near as aggressive’ as he is in his music.Read moreCelebrity DeathsAus rock legends announce member’s deathA long-serving member of Aussie rock legends Cold Chisel has died following a hard-fought battle with cancer.Read more