The "death of the author" has taken shape on different terms than Roland Barthes (1977) anticipated. Contract law, not copyright, now reigns in online spaces: media platforms' terms of service have eroded vestiges of copyright-protected notions of authorship in traditional media. In 2023, AI-assisted "deepfakes," circulated on YouTube and TikTok, further destabilized understandings of musical authorship and autonomy. Who should be recognized as the author of a musical deepfake—the forger, the engineers who developed the forger's filters, the musician being mimicked, or those whose music constitutes the AI's training datasets? Sianne Ngai's (2020) theory of the "gimmick," as a capitalist form that invites but also thwarts aesthetic judgment, provides a useful framework for understanding the copyright implications of AI-assisted deepfakes.
In this paper, I fuse Ngai's concept with Georgina Born's (2010) theory of the "distributed artwork," speculating about how impending copyright reforms will shape video platforms' participatory cultures. Drawing on fieldwork with software developers, I recount how the music information-retrieval (MIR) industry has pivoted toward calling public-domain music "clean data"—data ready for ethical extraction. Absent stable claims to authorship, producers of user-generated content in turn invoke the rhetorical figure of the content "creator," supplanting the notion of the author in online discourse: under platform capitalism, legally-protected authorship is replaced by "creation" absent fair use, while the public domain is reduced to the designation "clean." Examining the ongoing moral panic over vocal deepfakes, I show how popular music is implicated in contemporary rhetorical strategies shaping the AI copyright debate.

Dual lineages in Tuareg guitar constitute a complex matrix for considerations of intellectual property. On one hand, it emerged in circulation on homemade cassettes in the 1980s–90s as a potent vehicle for political advocacy, calling the transnational toumast (Tuareg nation) into being and into action across northwest Africa’s Sahel-Sahara. Culminating in the period of linked rebellions in Mali and Niger in the 1990s, Tuareg guitar thus developed into a critical collective heritage. On the other hand, a second thread in its more recent history—a growing culture of studio recordings and celebrity centered on performers like Bombino, Mdou Moctar, and other stars who command avid followings in the Sahel and worldwide—has begun to draw greater concern to intellectual property. At what point does a song move from a collective good to an individual artist’s intellectual property, at their sole discretion to control? And who gets to decide? In this paper, I show how this tension shapes a Tuareg “nongovernmental music culture” (Skinner 2015) in Niger, wherein musicians balance a shared repertoire and individual creativity with the inefficacies and promises of neoliberal copyright regimes. I draw on interviews and archival research conducted in Niger since 2012, informed by comparative scholarship on music intellectual property (e.g., Larkin 2008; Perullo 2011; Gani 2020; Erlmann 2022; Mann 2022; et al.), to outline the plural understandings of when and who can perform other artists’ compositions in a globalized Tuareg guitar world.

The path to creative success can be rocky. For composers of color in Los Angeles, the complexity is multifold: professional opportunities arise from a variety of classical music scenes and cultural businesses, yet are also entangled with considerations of musical tradition, ethnic diversity, economic precarity, and gendered dynamics. Such entanglements have sharpened in the wake of recent social concerns including #MeToo, anti-racism, and economic sustainability. The consequent quality and quantity of opportunities influence the shifting landscape of classical music production in Los Angeles, and thus call for an effective theoretical perspective in understanding these changing dynamics. Previous ethnographic research on classical musicians in metropolitan areas highlight the importance of musical tradition, social networks, and working conditions (Cottrell 2004); class, cultural preferences, and boundaries (Bull 2019); and entrepreneurialism and gendered minoritarian classical musicians (Scharff 2018). I analyze the changing professional landscape of composers in Los Angeles by building on concepts from Bourdieu’s field theory (1993) and intersectional feminist scholarship. Based on fieldwork case studies and informed by ideas developed by Ortner (1999) and Wacquant (2023), I argue that composers of color in Los Angeles skillfully negotiate aspects of their social positionality in the face of multicultural capitalism (Riley 2020) to create the best opportunities for sustainable success. By paying special attention to composers of color, this research 1) contributes to the visibility of marginalized populations within the classical music profession and 2) particularizes the experiences of economic realities through highlighting the heterogeneity of aspiring composers’ paths of professionalization.