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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how independent electronic music creators encounter genAI in the “release pipeline," where tracks become platform-ready through metadata, pitch writing, and promotion. It shows how AI affects invisible data labor, creative craft and qualculation in the platformized music economy.

Paper long abstract

Generative AI is rapidly transforming creative work, yet most research on AI in music focuses on its role in composition or audience consumption. This paper shifts attention to an overlooked stage of creative labor in the platformized music economy: the release pipeline, where tracks are formatted, classified, and rendered platform-legible before reaching audiences. In this stage, independent artists perform forms of often invisible data labor (e.g., metadata entry, genre-mood classification, pitch writing, cover art generation, and compliance documentation) which are increasingly mediated by generative AI tools. Drawing on qualitative interviews and observations with independent electronic music producers, the paper explores how creators embody and experience AI-assisted release work in practice. Rather than casting generative AI within the familiar binary of adoption versus resistance, this paper attends to the felt texture of creative labor, where musicians encounter AI not as an abstract technology but as a situated collaborator within everyday workflows. Preparing a track for platform release becomes an affectively charged practice in which artists move through moments of friction, convenience, hesitation, and subtle irritation as they prompt, edit, and negotiate with algorithmic outputs. These encounters generate a new layer of “qualculation” (Callon 2005), as artists simultaneously evaluate opportunities for platform visibility and monetization while managing risks to their authenticity and artistic credibility. By opening the release pipeline as a site of sociotechnical governance, the paper shows how generative AI reshapes not only creative workflows but also the embodied practices through which musicians, exercising distributed agency, negotiate artistic and commercial interests.