Josh Fawaz Adds AI Credits to Chart-Topping ‘Like a Prayer’ Cover After Backlash

Josh Fawaz, a creator facing significant public scrutiny over the absence of AI disclosures in the production of his music, has added AI credits to his chart-topping single ‘Like a Prayer.’

Fawaz’s cover of Madonna’s 1989 hit amassed more than 39 million streams on Spotify and spent four weeks atop the Australian national airplay charts before an ABC investigation raised questions about AI’s role in the track. He has since updated its credits on Spotify to include “GenerativeAI,” though it does not appear on Apple Music at the time of this writing.

The move comes amid a wider reckoning unfolding across social media, where DJs en masse continue to call out Fawaz and other creators accused of using AI to fake their way into the scene and divert streams from real artists. Needs No Sleep, an electronic producer who has released music on renowned labels like Defected, Toolroom and Repopulate Mars, called Fawaz “the biggest issue in music right now.”

“His music is generated entirely with AI,” Needs No Sleep said in a video shared on Instagram. “Yet it’s presented in a way that leads people to believe they’re watching a traditional producer finish a song. He types a prompt and then the track is made itself.”

“If this is the future of music production, where it’s just someone dancing around in a studio laughing as a producer, not one single video about how they actually made a track because all they’ve done is just type a prompt, then we really are cooked as a music industry.”

The update lands as Spotify pushes artists toward clearer AI disclosure amid a wider industry move toward standardized AI labeling. A coalition of the music industry’s biggest trade groups and unions, including the Recording Industry Association of America and the Grammys, recently unveiled a voluntary labeling system designed to tell fans whether a song was made by a human, an AI or some mix of both.

Sam Duboff, Spotify’s Global Head of Artists, Marketing & Policy, said earlier this month that the company wants human artists who use generative AI tools to declare that usage through a new beta labeling feature, a push that follows the removal of an estimated 75 million tracks flagged as spam from the platform over the past year.

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