Conference Agenda

Generative AI music platforms claim to democratize access to something resembling music-related activity, with Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman specifically defining those activities as “meaningful consumption experiences.” But in the context of the Suno user experience, how is meaning defined? What is being consumed? And what is the subsequent platform experience? This keynote will look at emergent user behavior on gen-AI music platforms and ways both the platforms and the users are answering those questions. Taking a broader look at the contemporary corporate capture of digital musicking, it will consider the ways prompt-based gen-AI platforms attempt to sell users new ideas of music and its purposes.

Recent scholarship has increasingly examined how digital platforms structure the circulation,
discovery, and consumption of popular music—from early peer-to-peer networks to
contemporary services such as Spotify and TikTok. Digital platforms operate as
intermediaries that bring multiple actors together within shared technological environments
while shaping interactions between them through specific technical and economic logics. As
a result, they not only distribute music but also influence how it is created, circulated, and
valued.

While discussions of platformization have often focused on distribution and
recommendation systems—for example, the influence of streaming services, playlists, and
algorithmic discovery—this paper argues that platform logics increasingly extend into the
domain of music production itself. Production tools, creative infrastructures, and social
media environments are becoming deeply intertwined, contributing to what might be
described as a broader platformization of music making.

Digital audio workstations (DAWs), such as Logic Pro or Ableton Live, increasingly resemble
what Foxman (2019) calls “platform tools”: infrastructures that are integral to the
production process while also connecting users to wider technological ecosystems. These
environments increasingly support online collaboration, integrated sound libraries, cloud
storage, and distribution features. At the same time, social media platforms such as TikTok
and Instagram increasingly function as spaces where creative experimentation, audience
interaction, and promotional activity converge. In parallel, new AI-based services and
platform-based production resources—such as automated mastering or cloud-based sample
libraries—further expand the technological infrastructures surrounding music creation.
Drawing on scholarship on platformization and cultural production (e.g. Sterne and
Razlogova 2019), this paper proposes a broad analytical framework for understanding the
platformization of music production. Rather than focusing on a single platform or stage of
the music value chain, it examines the evolving interplay between different types of
platforms involved in music creation, circulation, and interaction.

Through a discussion of selected cases—including DAWs, social media platforms, streaming
services, and hybrid systems such as BandLab—the paper identifies common features across
these infrastructures and explores how they reorganize creative practice. Taken together,
these developments suggest the emergence of what might be described as “platforms of
production”: technological environments that increasingly integrate music creation,
distribution, and social interaction within the same platformized ecosystems.

2025 was a watershed year for the institutional recognition of generative AI music,
with over ten artists appearing on the Billboard charts. While restricted from flagship
charts like the Hot 100, AI artists achieved chart success in genre-specific charts,
such as Christian Contemporary (CCM), R&B, and country rock, signifying that
industry legitimization is currently highest in genres aligned with conservative "family
values". To explore this phenomenon, this paper employs a diffractive methodology
inspired by Karen Barad, reading AI artifacts, platform discourse, and genre histories
through one another. I build from Georgina Born’s planes of social mediation, and
specifically Nick Prior’s "fifth plane" of algorithms and platforms, to approach AI
musicians as intra-active phenomena co-constituted by technology and audience
reception, focusing most specifically on the construction of gendered differences
within these platformed assemblages.

The paper develops three agential cuts to explore the how of these intra-actions and
the differences therein. The first examines CCM, where AI serves as a "pedagogy of
gender" by stabilizing traditional archetypes of "biblical" masculinity. I argue that
listeners prioritize the ideological message over the "messy" human body, engaging
with AI through individualistic "Jesus and Me" relationships that prioritize personal
transformation over embodied reality. The second cut focuses on AI R&B artist Xania
Monet, exploring the construction of idealized Black femininity and the use of
unconstrained bodies in virtual performativity to navigate the historical
marginalization of women’s labour within the music industries. The third explores the
country/rock artist Breaking Rust, whose success replicates gendered hierarchies of
labour by aligning AI production within notions of the masculine Romantic genius
figure.

This paper ultimately argues that generative AI does not disrupt popular music value
systems but instead reproduces, and sometimes amplifies, the ideological
frameworks through which gender, authenticity, and power have long been
organized. By tracing the intra-actions and assemblages across these genres, the
paper demonstrates how the chart successes of AI musicians, and those specifically
created through platform-based text-to-music software like Suno, reinforce
hegemonic masculinity and conservative values within the contemporary industry
landscape.

The Super Bowl Halftime Show functions as one of the most powerful and contested
media platforms in American popular culture—a stage that ostensibly transcends politics while
simultaneously serving as a site where racial identity, national belonging, and political ideology
are performed, policed, and disputed. This paper traces the recent history of the Halftime Show
as a platform, examining how its affordances (mass viewership, corporate sponsorship, and the
NFL’s insistence on “bi-partisan universality”) shape which artists are platformed, what aesthetic
and political registers are permissible, and how music is mobilized to advance or suppress social
goals.

Drawing on case studies from Beyoncé’s 2016 performance to Bad Bunny’s 2026 performance, this paper argues that the Halftime Show’s platforming logic is structured around a racially coded notion of Americanness. Beyoncé’s performance generated immediate counter-mobilization across social media platforms—from Reddit threads to the hashtag #BoycottBeyoncé—illustrating how platform ecosystems amplify and fragment political reception. Meanwhile, Bad Bunny;s celebration of Puerto Rican identity was met with erasure and denial of his American citizenship, revealing the whiteness embedded in the Halftime
Show's implicit aesthetic standards.

The paper also examines the emergence of counter-programming as a form of
de-platforming: Turning Point USA’s “All-American Halftime Show” represents a conservative
attempt to construct an alternative platform whose aesthetic is defined precisely by racial
exclusion. This dynamic illustrates how the dominant platform’s incentive structures, shaped by
advertiser interests, the NFL’s brand management, and the spectacle of “universal” American
citizenship, generate both compliant performances and reactive counter-platforms.
This paper further situates the Halftime Show within broader questions of musical
un-platforming, using Colin Kaepernick’s effective blackballing from the NFL following his free
speech activism as a case study in how platforms discipline political dissent. Ultimately, the
Super Bowl Halftime Show reveals how music operates as a platform for political and social
goals—and especially when those goals are officially denied.

For the past ten years, the video game livestreaming platform Twitch.tv has held a
fraught and shifting relationship with commercial copyrighted music due to the 1998
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Record labels have repeatedly confronted Twitch
on allowing unpermitted streaming of copyrighted music on the platform, all while users
engage with copyrighted music both as part of the games they stream and the “personas”
they perform for their viewers (Jackson 2023). Twitch, playing mediator between users and
labels, enforces complaints from rights holders while offering alternative music for users’
streaming soundscapes. Meanwhile, ongoing copyright disputes still arise, resulting in
deleted content, sporadically muted audio, banned users, and attempts at evading
Twitch’s copyright detection.

I argue the precarity of using copyrighted music on Twitch results from a collapse of
ontologies of music as activated by each ontology’s campaigner. Such ontologies include
1) music as resource to the streaming economy (Drott 2024), 2) music as asset to
intellectual property law (Pistor 2019), 3) music as ludo-narrative device for video game
media (Ivănescu 2024), and 4) music as performance to the Twitch streamer (Woodcock
and Johnson 2019). Pre-existing ontologies of music clash on Twitch due to the platform’s
hypermediality (Bolter and Grusin 2000), yielding two phenomena within Twitch’s
soundscapes: streamer ambivalence and lingering silences. Twitch can therefore serve as
example of the contingent positions and identities of commercial music in today’s gaming and entertainment industry, as well as how individuals in platform societies work around
contingency to create new forms of performance.