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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how generative AI reshapes musical work by reconfiguring musicians’ agency, platform governance, cultural values, and copyright. It shows how AI’s epistemologies reorganise creativity, legitimacy, and the future of work in music.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how generative AI is reconfiguring the world of music by transforming not only creative practices but also the epistemic conditions under which musical work is organised, valued, and governed. Drawing on an STS framework and an empirically grounded case study of AI in music between 2023 and 2026, the paper approaches music as a sociotechnical field in which musicians, platforms, markets, legal regimes, audiences, and cultural values are increasingly reorganised through the implementation of AI systems.

Rather than treating AI merely as a tool, the paper analyses it as a future-oriented epistemic framework that promotes particular models of music-making, circulation, and ownership. In the music sector, these epistemologies reshape work processes by privileging forms of prompting, selection, monitoring, and adaptation, while redistributing agency across musicians, new platform infrastructures, datasets, interfaces, and AI providers. This transformation affects the evaluative and organisational work required to integrate, repair, regulate, and make sense of AI in musical activities.

The paper focuses on four dimensions: the transformation of musicians’ work and professional agency; the reconfiguration of cultural values such as authenticity, authorship, and creativity; the growing role of digital platforms in governing visibility, legitimacy, and monetisation; and the copyright controversies surrounding training data, synthetic voices, and ownership. Empirically, it combines document analysis and multi-site digital ethnography. Overall, it argues that meaningful futures of musical work with AI are not determined by the technical features of AI but will emerge as outcomes collectively negotiated through frictions, controversies, and sociotechnical reassembling processes.