An Unauthorized Afterlife
If you were a teenager in the mid-2000s, chances are you left behind a digital graveyard of cobwebbed MySpace pages, Photobucket accounts locked behind forgotten passwords, and Blogspot entries collecting dust. It was a time when middle school-aged millennials haphazardly taught ourselves HTML to build glittery profile themes, infected our family computers with LimeWire viruses, and handpicked the eight people who would occupy our most coveted social real estate.
Most of us like to imagine that our awkward thirteen-year-old selves were safely buried somewhere between the collapse of MySpace and the rise of Facebook.
Delenda thought so, too. But the internet has a way of exhuming what we thought we'd left behind.
Nearly twenty years after writing "Lucky Number Three" as part of her teenage music project, Broken Toy Airplanes, the San Antonio musician learned through a YouTube comment that the song had unexpectedly found a massive new audience. An artist dubbed Cuntsniffer had sampled the track without permission, retitled it "Meant To Be," and initially released it without crediting Delenda as the songwriter or vocalist. It quickly became his most-streamed release, amassing roughly 2 million streams.
By the time Delenda discovered what had happened, millions of people had already heard her teenage voice without attribution.
"I was just spiraling," she said. "What the fuck does this mean?"
Delenda's story is one of the stranger chapters in San Antonio's recent wave of internet music virality. In recent years, artists like Inoha, mypilotis, and Temachii have found audiences far beyond South Texas through TikTok and streaming algorithms. Musicians no longer need years of touring, radio airplay, or industry connections to reach listeners. Today, you can build an audience of millions without ever leaving your bedroom.
The flip side is that musicians are increasingly losing control over how their work exists online. Songs are flattened into 15-second sound bites for other people's videos. Older recordings, such as Labi Siffre's 1970s song "Bless the Telephone," are resurrected by algorithms and introduced to entirely new audiences. Earlier this year, The Atlantic even published a searchable database of music used to train generative AI models, revealing that countless artists—including San Antonio musician Garrett T. Capps—had work circulating through those datasets.
For Delenda, that loss of control became deeply personal.
Beyond the copyright dispute, which is still being resolved with the assistance of an attorney, Delenda has grappled with the emotional weight of hearing a song she wrote during a difficult chapter of her childhood become associated with someone whose online reputation she finds deeply troubling.
"It's very conflicted," she said.
On one hand, there's validation. “Seeing all these younger folks enjoy it is really nice.” On the other hand, they're discovering it through circumstances she never chose.
Fortunately, the internet leaves a digital trail. Listeners have begun tracing the song back to its original creator, and the credits on the remixed version have since been updated to include Delenda's name.
Ironically, one of the biggest moments in the song's second life came not from the unauthorized remix, but from the original itself. North West, daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, posted a TikTok lip-syncing to Delenda's original recording.
"It's been very weird," Delenda said. "The reason I've always made music is for connection. This certainly wasn't the type of connection that I was ever expecting."
The experience has also forced her to reflect on how dramatically music discovery has changed.
"I think TikTok does expose people to music," she said. "But it's often an afterthought of the experience."
The internet looked very different when Delenda first uploaded her music in 2006. MySpace profiles often featured full-length songs embedded directly into users' pages, where visitors could listen while browsing photos and reading blog posts. Users trusted that anyone who landed on their profile would experience those songs in the context they had intended. Today, songs are often untethered from the people who wrote them, instead reaching listeners as brief audio clips attached to someone else's anecdote, dance, or viral trend.
Delenda's experience reflects the strange afterlife of digital creations. The internet can preserve a piece of art indefinitely, but it can also strip it of the circumstances that gave it meaning.
For Delenda, though, the story isn't ending with lawyers or royalty negotiations.
Instead of trying to capitalize on an unexpected viral moment, she's looking for ways to transform it into something positive. She's exploring merchandise that could benefit local charities and inviting fellow San Antonio musicians to create authorized remixes of "Lucky Number Three."
Most of us are fortunate enough to leave our thirteen-year-old creative projects behind.
"You can publish a song 20 years ago and think the internet forgot about it, but someone has a shovel, and they're ready to dig."