Hong Kong’s proposed AI copyright exception will reach performers’ rights, not just songs, and it is landing in the same year the city posted a top-five global result in live music.
The live side is already a global top five
Kai Tak Stadium opened on 1 March 2025. In its first year it sold 1.25 million tickets worth USD 191.34 million, ranking third worldwide by tickets sold and fifth by gross, and first in Asia on both counts, on Pollstar’s year-end tallies as reported by Time Out Hong Kong on 16 December 2025.
The bookings are not niche. Coldplay, JJ Lin, Seventeen and the 2025 MAMA Awards in year one, Blackpink in January 2026, and Sammi Cheng closing her You & Mi Asia tour at the stadium on 10 and 11 July 2026.
The recorded side is being rewritten around AI
TDM means text and data mining: the bulk copying of works to train or improve software, including generative AI models.
The Hong Kong government consulted on a TDM exception to the Copyright Ordinance from 8 July to 8 September 2024. It received 62 written submissions, 24 of them from copyright owners and their organisations, including bodies representing music and music recordings, according to the government’s outcome paper to the Legislative Council panel tabled for discussion on 18 February 2025.
The split in that paper is clean. Except for copyright owners, most respondents supported the exception. Copyright owners generally opposed it, arguing it would cut across existing and emerging licensing markets and fail the three-step test under the WTO TRIPS Agreement.
The government is proceeding anyway, covering commercial and non-commercial use, with these restrictive conditions:
- Users must have lawful access to the copyright works
- Infringing copies must not be used
- Users must keep and disclose records of the source of the works
- The exception does not apply where a relevant licensing scheme is available
- Copyright owners get an opt-out
Footnote 7 of that paper is the part artists should read. The government says it will mirror the exception in Part III of the Ordinance, so making a copy of a fixation for computational data analysis will not infringe rights in a fixed performance either. Session players, featured vocalists and producers are inside this, not adjacent to it.
The Standard reported on 20 February 2025 that Director of Intellectual Property David Wong Fuk-loi expected an amendment bill in the first half of that year. It has still not reached the Legislative Council.
What this changes for an independent release
An opt-out is only worth what a crawler can find. A reservation of rights sitting in an email thread is not a reservation of rights.
The licensing-scheme carve-out is the more useful clause for indies. Where a licence is genuinely available for your catalogue, the exception does not apply to it. Being licensable is a defence, which is the mirror image of the opt-in structure now standard in 2026 AI music licensing deals.
What to have on file before the bill lands
- A written AI training reservation per release, stored with your delivery metadata rather than in a manager’s inbox
- Correct identifiers. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, and ISWC is its equivalent for compositions. Source-record duties mean nothing against an unidentified catalogue
- Performer credits captured at delivery, because Part III rights travel with people, not labels
- A named licensing contact in your metadata, so a licence is available in practice
The collection gap nobody is closing
CASH, the Composers and Authors Society of Hong Kong, distributes to members twice a year, in May and November, according to its own royalty distribution page. That is performing-right money on compositions. It is not the recording and performer rights the TDM exception touches, and no Hong Kong body is collecting on that side.
So the protection is contractual and metadata-driven, and it sits with whoever delivers your masters. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the messaging standard DSPs use to ingest releases, and it is where rights reservations and performer credits either travel with the file or quietly do not. The gap runs across the region, from Taiwan’s stalled streaming licence rates to Thailand’s new collector licensing rules.
Hong Kong is on course to hold Asia’s strongest live music infrastructure and one of its more permissive AI training regimes at once. Assume the ticket money is real and the recording protections are yours to assert.
