Manifesto
Made by humans. Tracked. Paid.
Music has always been built on the music before it. A break becomes a genre. A bassline becomes a hundred tracks. Sampling, remixing, flipping, covering — that’s not theft, it’s how the form moves. The problem was never that music gets reused. The problem is who gets paid when it does, and who gets erased.
How it works now
Today the system fights the thing music does naturally. Labels own your masters and keep most of the money. A remix is “official” and paid only if you cleared it through a maze first; otherwise it’s “unofficial” and pays the original nothing. Sampling is something you litigate, not something you do. The intermediaries got rich on ownership they didn’t earn, and the people who made the sounds got a footnote.
The AI moment
Now the machines have arrived, and they’re doing what they do first: extracting. Models trained on a century of human music — no consent, no credit, no check. Producers are right to hate it. We hate it too.
But the fight isn’t AI versus no-AI. That one’s already lost — the extraction tech works, and it’s not going back in the box. The real fight is extraction with no consent versus opt-in with provenance and pay. The enemy was never technology. The enemy is extraction. The machine should serve the musician — and when it reaches for your work, you should know, and you should get paid.
What we’re building
So GitTunes is the version where the musician sets the terms. Every sound is made by a human, traceable to that human, and routed back to that human when it earns. Open it up for a kickback or keep it in the vault — your call, per project. We’re not here to be a cop for the labels or a martyr for a cause. We’re here to build the rights-respecting thing that’s so obviously better that the industry moves around it. Bandcamp, not Napster.
The bigger play
Once the economics are proven, the company funds a foundation to go change the law — compulsory licensing for stems, statutory rates for AI training, sample-clearance reform. The protocol is the flag. The foundation is the advocate. The company is the working proof. That’s how you change an industry without becoming a casualty of it.
If you make music, this is yours.
Yours to use and yours to shape. Come build the early version with us.