backstory.music
The stories behind
the music.
A music publishing platform where artists document what they made and why — gear, inspiration, lyrical intent, collaborators — and readers meet the music already oriented by the artist’s own account.
The AI era
Craft needs to be visible.
AI-generated music is becoming everywhere. If listeners only meet the audio file, they may not be able to tell what came from a human life, a real practice, a careful set of choices, or an automated output.
Backstory makes the artist and the making part of consumption: the source of the idea, the hands-on craft, the instruments, the false starts, and the intent. That context helps listeners understand the art and the value of human-made work.
What we’re building
The story is part of the song.
Music discovery has collapsed into genre algorithms. You find a song because it resembles another song. You hear it; you like it; you move on. The artist — their intent, their gear, the night they wrote it, the record that got them started — stays invisible.
Streaming services treat the song as the whole artefact. Backstory doesn’t. What the artist intended, what they used, where they were, who helped — that’s not a press-kit footnote. It’s part of what the song is.
How it works
Read the making.
Hear it differently.
Arrive at the music already oriented — the gear, the inspiration, the night it was written — so the song lands with context, not cold. The making is part of the listening, not a footnote to it.
How artists write
A palette of story sections.
Artists compose their page from short structured sections — identity, intent, inspiration, origin, production, lyrical meaning, aesthetic, collaborators — plus a Custom option for anything outside the list. Pick what fits, skip the rest, publish each one when it’s ready. Each section stands alone; together they become the programme.
The programme before the curtain rises.
Discovery
Find music through what made it.
Every published section is tagged. Browse by inspiration (Tarkovsky), by gear (Kemper Profiler), by theme (displacement), by place (Singapore). These pages are organically valuable — the underlying material doesn’t exist anywhere else.