Daily 8/25: ARIA bars AI-only songs from charts, Paramount-WBD deal slows, Korea pushes webtoon standards

ARIA will exclude fully AI-generated songs from Australia's charts, the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger is delayed by an antitrust fight in California, and TTA is pushing Korea-led webtoon standards alongside AI work for EPUB.

• [Digital Music News] ARIA Excludes Fully AI-Generated Songs From Australia's Charts ↗

  The Australian Recording Industry Association will exclude fully AI-generated songs from its official charts. The move does not appear to ban songs with human vocals or AI-assisted production, but it draws a line at tracks made without human artists performing them. As AI tracks scale quickly across distribution and streaming, the chart system is being forced to decide what should count as popular music performance. Distributors and platforms will need cleaner ways to distinguish AI-assisted work from fully generated output.

• [CNBC] Paramount-WBD Antitrust Fight Puts a Chill on Media M&A ↗

  Paramount's proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery is being delayed by California's antitrust lawsuit. CNBC frames the holdup as more than a single deal problem, warning that it could freeze the next wave of media consolidation. Legacy studios have leaned on scale as a way to absorb content and distribution costs in the streaming era, while regulators are taking a harder look at market concentration and consumer choice. That makes mergers a more complicated growth plan for companies trying to keep up with global platforms.

• [ZDNet Korea] TTA Pushes Korea-Led Webtoon Standards and AI Work for EPUB ↗

  Korea's Telecommunications Technology Association has started work on international webtoon standards and is also advancing efforts to connect AI functions with EPUB. If Korea's webtoon production and distribution practices move into a global standard, platforms and studios could spend less time adapting content to incompatible formats. AI work around EPUB could also affect translation, accessibility, layout, and other parts of the digital publishing workflow. The larger move is to treat webtoons as part of global publishing infrastructure rather than content locked inside individual platforms.