Song Seal

A permanent, append-only record of when a piece of music existed.

No records exist yet. This domain is live and empty on purpose. When the first song is sealed it will be published here, at an address built from an id that never changes — so it still resolves if the artist renames, and it will still be here in twenty years.

What a record contains

The dates — what the artist claims, and what we witnessed. Never merged.
A fingerprint of whatever was sealed — the recording, the words, the artwork. A record says which, and carries only what actually existed.
Who was credited, and with what share, frozen at that moment.
Whether AI was used, as the artist declared it.
Timestamp anchors where they were taken, so the date can be checked without trusting us. A record states its own anchor status; a date with no anchor rests on this host, and says so rather than implying otherwise.
A correction ledger. Corrections are added, never applied — the original and the correction both stay visible. Each entry commits to the one before it, so removing or reordering the history breaks every entry after it.

What is never in a record

Any fan. No name, no message, no membership — and no count either. A record proves who made something, not how many people were watching.
Anything that depends on a release, a store, or this company existing.

The vocabularies a record cites

Where a record states how AI was used, or why a correction was made, it cites a published scheme by id and says nothing more — the meaning lives in that document. The documents are frozen and checksummed, so the one you read today is the one the record committed to. They carry the record format's licence too.

How to check a record without us

Published now, before there is anything to check, because the promise is that you can verify a record without our help — and a promise you can only read about afterwards is worth less than one you can read about first.

1. Download the file the record describes.
2. Run:  sha256sum yourfile.wav
3. Compare the digest to the one printed on the record.
   Identical means these are the same bytes.

4. Where a record carries anchors, its date can be checked against
   parties who have never heard of us. A record without them says so:

   OpenTimestamps   ots verify record.ots
                    resolves to a Bitcoin block header.
   RFC 3161         openssl ts -verify -in record.tsr -CAfile chain.pem
                    the certificate chain is stored IN the record,
                    not linked, so it still verifies when the
                    timestamp authority is gone.

Or use the checker

The same steps, automated. It is one file, it has no dependencies, and it reads only files you already have — so it keeps working if this site does not.

curl -O https://songseal.org/verify.mjs
node verify.mjs record.json yourfile.wav

Two honest limits. This copy is served by the same host that serves the records, so it is a convenience, not an independent check — the standard commands above owe us nothing and are the stronger path. And for anchors the checker prints the external commands to run rather than reaching a verdict of its own, because our verdict about our own dates would be worth nothing.

A record proves this exact file existed by this date and has not changed since. It does not prove authorship, it is not a copyright registration, and nobody here reviews it. A single seal is weak evidence; the trail of seals across time is the evidence.