From Papaoutai to Urban Chords: The business and legal stakes of AI music
Who owns an AI remix? Who gets paid? And can African artistes protect their work from AI? This deep dive examines the business, copyright tensions, and economic realities shaping music’s AI era.
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In December 2025, the Afro-soul version of the French song “Papaoutai” was released. It began trending heavily in early January 2026, peaking globally during the third week of January. By January 15, 2026, the track became the highest new entry on the Global Spotify charts, debuting at #168. It eventually climbed to #2 on the Billboard World Digital Song Sales chart.<br />
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What many did not know, however, was that it was an AI-generated remix of the original song. The original artiste is Stromae, a Belgian-Rwandan musician, rapper, and songwriter. The voice, however, is not actually Stromae’s original recording slowed down; it is an AI voice model trained on the voice of Arsène Mukendi, a Congolese-born artiste known for his appearance on The Voice France. The producers used AI voice cloning (Retrieval-based Voice Conversion) to project Mukendi’s soulful, African-inflected vocal texture onto the melody of Stromae’s original 2013 hit.<br />
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The trend was fueled by videos featuring a cinematic lip-sync by Arsène Mukendi himself, and because Mukendi is a real person and a talented singer, the visual looked so authentic that millions of users believed he had actually recorded a studio cover.<br />
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Interestingly, there has been a series of AI-generated remixes in recent times. In 2025, an unauthorised AI-generated choir version of Nigerian artiste Fave’s song Intentions created by an entity known as Urban Chords went viral on TikTok. <br />
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The AI model ingested the original vocal stems and transformed them into a multi-layered choral arrangement. Instead of a takedown, Fave entered the studio, recorded over the AI arrangement, and released it as an official remix. <br />
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While this sets a precedent for hybrid collaboration where the artiste uses the AI derivative to recapture streaming revenue, it also exposes the complexities of AI-generated remixes, especially for African artistes.<br />
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Music and media counsel, Ugwu Chikezirim, has seen this play out firsthand. One of his clients, a well-known Nigeria...
