A roadmap is published. A ctx team comes together across three continents. A personal hero, C, responds to an unsolicited email from me regarding ctx, offering encouragement and a bit of advice: “Music on the internet needs to be fixed, so please take your time and do it right :)”
I saw “take your time” and flinched. Isn’t the velocity of our days only increasing? Doesn’t the recent spate of apocalyptic proclamations indicate that we will be extinct or singularitized in a matter of decades, or years?
Certainly we are headed for a more chaotic chapter, but whatever course it ends up taking, I want it to include a peaceful enclave in which we can co-listen with our friends and extended community around the world. And C is right: few good things are built in haste. We owe it to ourselves to design something deliberate, artful, durable.
Since the beginning of this year I have been on a tear, moonlighting on ctx at the expense of sleep and occasionally sanity. The coalescence of a team over the last couple weeks comes as a relief, for reasons both of shared labor and confirmation of vision.
A few things I’d like to highlight from the roadmap linked above:
personal api keys — reach your own ctx library from your own scripts and tools.
initial substrate publishing — a publicly downloadable database of the substrate of all works added to ctx, and all of their metadata, without any user library data, released as a public good for anyone to utilize or build upon. after the initial publishing, subsequent publishings will happen on a monthly basis.
library export — take your data out of ctx in a form that lets you easily repopulate your library anywhere else.
open development — moving the work into the open on a public code repository, so anyone can read it, audit it, and help build ctx.
nonprofit governance — moving ctx into an independent nonprofit so it belongs to its mission and community, not to any one person, and can outlive whoever is running it.
These are the items that directly pertain to ctx’s commitment to openness, persistence and non-extraction. The first three in this list are less than a month away from implementation. The last two are medium-term goals, timeline tbd.
And since this project is ultimately about bringing us back to the music, here is a collage of what I have been rinsing lately. Happy to say I found many of these on the ctx peers stream, which has afforded a new kind of “listening with” experience that I am enjoying quite a lot.
OK, til next time ☆
Tony