Crate. Own your music.

I wrote my first line of code using a ZX Spectrum 48Kb; it was 1985, and I was ten years old. Since then, I have never stopped coding. I am a developer, first a human being and then a developer. I need you to understand how much I love it, it's my way of life, my job, my passion.

I've spent the last two months building a music platform. I haven't written a single line of code. Not one. Literally. Tokens, coffee, and lost hours of sleep.

Crate is a full music platform — in some ways, more complete than Spotify, Tidal, or Apple Music. It serves audio, does on-the-fly transcoding, enriches tracks, albums, and artists from a ton of sources, runs audio analysis and extracts track similarity vectors, has an adaptive equalizer that reads the audio profile of each track or follows the genre taxonomy, a discovery radio like the one Pandora had back in the early 2000s, and a lot more.

Again: not a single line of code. AI agents wrote all of it. Claude, Codex, and the ultra-efficient and extremely cheap chinese models. My role was architecture, product direction, code review, and quality control. No IDE — just the terminal, the agents, and me.

This is a radically different way to build software. It's not "vibe coding." It's not "prompt and pray." It's orchestration. Planning, decomposing, reviewing, correcting. Like being a film director instead of a camera operator. The ceiling for what one person can build has moved.

There's a political, social, anti-capitalist undercurrent behind Crate. I built it because I can't stomach what Spotify, Apple, and Amazon have done to music.

Spotify pays less per stream than any competitor while spending billions on stock buybacks, podcast exclusives, and military AI contracts that are being used to perpetrate a genocide. The pro-rata model is a legal scam: your subscription subsidizes Ed Sheeran's royalty check while the band that changed your life can't pay rent. The algorithm buries independent music under AI-generated filler and major-label playlist placements. The entire relationship between a listener and a musician is mediated by a corporation whose only incentive is to keep you scrolling. Fuck that system.

Crate is a tool to break out of this. Self-hosted. Open source. Free for anyone who wants it.

I am fully aware of the irony here. Crate is an open-source, anti-corporate tool, but it was built using AI models owned by the very tech giants I despise. There is a strange satisfaction in that: using their multi-billion-dollar computing power to write the code that aims to bypass their platforms. It’s practical hacking—using their own tools against them.

Crate is not ready for a launch, and honestly, it probably will never be. But it works, and it works really well. Some features are simply amazing, while others are just fine for now. My goal here isn't to sell a finished product; really, I don't want to sell anything. My goal here is to spread the word to people who love music as much as I do and show them that there is another way. If this helps me connect with fellow developers, beta testers, or contributors, that is my absolute win.

If this stirs something in your gut, get on board. Install Crate, use it, break it, contribute however you can — open an issue, submit a pull request. All contributions welcome.

The code is on GitHub. The manifesto is at https://cratemusic.app/why.

The agents are still building.

https://cratemusic.app/