The protocol
An open protocol, not a walled garden.
GitTunes is a company, but the thing underneath it is a public, MIT-licensed protocol — a wire format for version-controlled, provenance-aware music. Anyone can read it. Anyone can build on it. It outlives us.
Why open
Platforms die. Napster, Grooveshark, MySpace, Splice Studio — the graveyard is full of places people trusted with their music. We built GitTunes so that if the company disappears, your identity and your work don’t. Your keys live on your machine. Your objects are content-addressed and signed. Any conforming implementation can read them. The protocol is the part that can’t be shut down.
The three layers
GitTunes is built in three layers, kept legally distinct on purpose. Each layer protects the others. The company gets sued, the protocol survives. The protocol gets challenged, the foundation litigates. It’s the Linux model — kernel, foundation, Red Hat — pointed at music.
What’s in it
Under the hood, in plain language:
- Content-addressed
- Every object — a stem, a project, a commit — is named by the hash of its contents (BLAKE3). Identical stems dedupe automatically; tampering is detectable for free.
- Signed
- Your identity is an Ed25519 keypair (a did:key DID). You sign your commits. The server never sees your private key.
- Provenance-first
- Forks, stems, and remixes carry cryptographic lineage. That graph is what makes attribution traceable and splits computable.
- Federation-ready
- No server-specific IDs. v0 runs on one server; the design doesn’t assume it.
Platform, not pirate
The open protocol is also how we say platform, not pirate. The graveyard taught us the platforms that survive are rights-respecting by construction. So: private by default. License declarations are first-class. Provenance is built in, not bolted on. We’re rails for musicians who want to set their own terms — not a place to launder someone else’s masters.
Read the spec
The spec, the architecture, and the decision records open publicly at launch. Want an early look? Join the early access list and we’ll share the protocol docs as they open up.