Since the 2010s, the singer-songwriter has re-emerged as a highly visible and controversial figure in popular music. Long associated with authenticity, authorship, emotional immediacy, introspection and political commitment, this figure is currently being embraced, reworked and debated across a wide range of genres and media environments. It now functions as a flexible cultural template through which artists can be positioned in relation to questions of creative autonomy, sincerity, social critique and personal expression.

Against this backdrop, the project explores how the singer-songwriter figure is being revived, diversified and recalibrated within digital-algorithmic media cultures. Social networks, streaming platforms, online communities and AI-supported media technologies do not merely circulate music or document artistic careers. They provide communicative situations in which musicians are addressed, presented, recognised and, at times, shape their own identities as singer-songwriters. In doing so, these media environments activate older promises associated with the figure — authenticity, introspection, autonomy, sincerity and social critique — whilst reshaping them under contemporary conditions of visibility, participation and algorithmic circulation.

The project analyses and describes the discursive and non-discursive practices through which the singer-songwriter figure is produced in selected transmedia constellations. It focuses on different but interconnected modes of figuration: the updating of authorship and artistic autonomy through platforms such as Patreon, X and TikTok (Amanda Palmer, Taylor Swift, Mitski, Frank Ocean); the recalibration of the confessional mode in streaming cultures (Billie Eilish, Lewis Capaldi); the interplay between (self-)documentary and fictional media in the self-fashioning of songwriter personas (Lady Gaga, Victoria Canal); the political mobilisation of singer-songwriter semantics in social movements, political commentary and topical song traditions (Tori Amos, Kendrick Lamar, Jesse Welles); reaction video cultures and their modes of affective authentication (Ren); and the renewed debate about creativity and authenticity in the age of generative AI (Nick Cave, John Lennon/The Beatles).

The central questions are: How, by whom, and under what media-technological conditions is someone addressed as a singer-songwriter? What aesthetic, political, commercial or identity-related functions do such figurations serve? How are these self-fashionings authenticated, and what forms of inclusion and exclusion do they produce? By addressing these questions, the project contributes to a genealogy of the singer-songwriter figure and develops a more nuanced vocabulary for analysing popular-cultural figuration processes in digital-algorithmic media cultures.