Annabelle Herd on AI Policy: "Getting This Right Means Everyone Wins"

A Hall of Fame celebration is typically a chance to bury hatchets, to raise a toast, and to remember the tunes and artists that turned you on during the formative years.

When ARIA inducted six acts into its Hall of Fame on Thursday evening, June 11, the occasion presented a the industry with a chance to take stock, and identify the battles that lay ahead. Specifically, artificial intelligence and its profound threat (and opportunity) to the creative community.

At the tail-end of 2025, Australia’s Productivity Commission completed a year-long inquiry  with the publication of its final report  on  Harnessing data and digital technology. In it, the Commission concluded it would be “premature to make changes to Australia’s copyright laws,” despite lobby efforts from big tech.

That followed Attorney-General Michelle Rowland ’s  announcement  that the federal government wouldn’t water-down existing copyright protections, essentially shutting down the creative sectors’ concerns that an exemption would be carved out for text and data mining (TDM).

The music industry shifted into gear, as the likes of ARIA Award winners Missy Higgins and The Presets’ Julian Hamilton, and Midnight Oil frontman and former Labor frontbencher Peter Garrett, and 2026 ARIA Hall of Fame inductee Kate Ceberano stepped up to advocate for rights holders.

“Our opportunity to shape how AI influences music and what Australian music looks like for generations to come relies on us all getting it right in this regulatory and political moment,” ARIA CEO Annabelle Herd remarked at the top of the 2026 ARIA Hall of Fame. “Getting this right means everyone wins,” she added, pointing to artists and rightsholders, tech platforms, consumers, music fans, and the Australian economy.

AI, and the conversation around it, is everywhere right now. Just this week, the trade body clarified its position on AI generated music ahead of the 2026 ARIA Awards. Going forward, “recordings/items that incorporate elements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be submitted for entry, but only if a human is the primary creator of such recording/item and the human contribution is substantial and meaningful,” reads the updated ARIAs guidelines. AI cannot be the sole or central element of any recording/item that is submitted for entries” and any AI services or tools used to assist in the creation of any potential nominees “must be a properly authorized and lawful service/tool.”

The industry will be like a dog with a bone on AI, Herd insists. It won’t give up.

“Our opportunity to shape how AI influences music and what Australian music looks like for generations to come relies on us all getting it right in this regulatory and political moment,” she said during her comments at the top of the HoF.

Read Herd’s opening address at the ARIA Hall of Fame 2026:

Good evening, and welcome to The ARIA Hall of Fame 2026 Special Event.

I want to thank Binowee for that beautiful Welcome and pay my respects to Gadigal elders past and present, and to all the First Nations artists, storytellers, colleagues, and friends in the room tonight.

I’d like to welcome Tony Burke, Minister for the Arts; former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern; Susan Templeman, Special Envoy for the Arts; Senator Sarah Hanson Young; and Millie Millgate of Music Australia.

Thank you also to NSW Music Minister John Graham who can’t be here tonight and Sound NSW, Music Australia, and the Office of the Arts for supporting this event.

From the bottom of our hearts, we are grateful for your deep support and passion for Australian music and our industry. Through a difficult time of disruption and transition with lots of challenges, we know that you have our backs and are doing everything possible to enable Australian music to flourish.

This is the first time the Hall of Fame has stood as its own event since 2010. The reason we wanted to bring it back this year is – of course – that it is the ARIA Awards’ 40 th birthday which is a chance to pause and think about everything that got us here: who took the early risks, who played the rooms we still play in and opened the doors that everyone’s walking through now.

It is also a chance to induct a group of very deserving artists on a night which is all about them.

The six artists being inducted – Gurrumul, Jenny Morris, Kate Ceberano, Spiderbait, The Living End, and Vika and Linda – between them have shaped what Australian music sounds like, through extraordinary songs and records, magnetic stage presence, and all the joy and emotion they have gifted us over the years. Lucky for us we get to spend the next few hours celebrating this incredible achievement properly together and with them.

A huge and warm welcome to our inductees and to family, friends and the people who have been part of the journey to this moment. We have a very special evening planned for you all and I hope that it is a night that you will always remember and treasure. You might want to keep the tissues on hand, we did manage to get Tim Rogers to cry last year so…

A 40th anniversary lets you reflect and think hard about where we are and what comes next. As we gather tonight there are several very important national conversations happening, the outcomes of which will shape the future of Australian music and impact generations of artists going forward.

The big, inescapable one is obviously AI.

This year, the skies between the U.S. and Canberra have been busy with planes carrying AI and tech company CEOs and senior executives to Canberra. They arrive waving very large cheques and promising generation-defining investment in Australia, provided we make some “tiny” tweaks to our copyright laws to remove consent and control from artists and rightsholders.

Our opportunity to shape how AI influences music and what Australian music looks like for generations to come relies on us all getting it right in this regulatory and political moment.

Getting this right means everyone wins: artists and rightsholders, tech platforms, consumers, music fans, and the Australian economy.

For artists and rightsholders, getting this wrong means losing consent and control over how your work is used by AI. Being forced to watch your life’s work disappear into someone else’s AI product to be exploited and monetised without permission or anything resembling fair payment. And it’s hard to even conceive of the damage if AI has unfettered access to extract and exploit thousand of generations of First Nations culture and storytelling.

A country with a creative and media culture as strong as ours will not rewrite its laws on the advice of the people who stand to profit most from dismantling them. Tech companies do not decide how an artist’s music is used, on what terms or at what price. That is the prerogative of the artist and the copyright owner.

We thank Minister Burke, the Attorney-General, Michelle Rowland, and others who have stood firm with creators so far in the face of this immense pressure. All we can say is hold firm!

But tonight, let’s leave AI at the door and live and be fully present in this very special and very human moment.

This is a room of people who love music, who love Australian music and the artists who made it. And tonight, we ask that you show the love. Be loud, be warm, get up and dance and sing along wherever you feel like singing (as long as it’s during a performance). These six have earned every bit of it.

A huge thanks to the amazing ARIA team, Second Sunday event production team, and the Roving broadcast crew for the huge work and love that goes into a night like this; to the ABC for broadcasting the Hall of Fame to Australian audiences, and to every one of you for being here. We’ve got a good one for you, let’s go!

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/pro/annabelle-herd-speech-2026-aria-hall-of-fame/)._