Since the 2010s, the singer-songwriter has re-emerged as a highly visible and contested figure in popular music. Long associated with authenticity, authorship, emotional immediacy, introspection, and political commitment, the figure is currently being taken up, 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 background, the project explores how the singer-songwriter figure is revived, diversified, and recalibrated in 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, staged, recognized, and sometimes self-fashioned as singer-songwriters. In doing so, these media environments activate older promises attached to the figure — authenticity, introspection, autonomy, sincerity, and social critique — while reshaping them under contemporary conditions of visibility, participation, and algorithmic circulation.

The project analyzes and describes the discursive and non-discursive practices through which the singer-songwriter figure is produced in selected transmedial 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 interaction of (self-)documentary and fictional media in the self-fashioning of songwriter personas (Lady Gaga, Victoria Canal); the political mobilization 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? Which aesthetic, political, commercial, or identity-related functions do such figurations serve? How are these self-fashionings authenticated, and which 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 analyzing popular-cultural figuration processes in digital-algorithmic media cultures.