MANIFESTO
A record is not a file. It has weight, a pressing run, a country and a number in the runout groove. CrateCore exists so none of that gets lost.
CrateCore is a daily read about records and the people who made them — and an app that helps collectors keep track of what sits on their shelves.
Short, factual stories about albums, artists and labels: anniversaries, first pressings, reissues, studio history, the odd corner of music history worth a few minutes. Everything is tied to physical music culture — vinyl and CDs, sleeves, studios, shops.
EDITORIAL
How a story is made
We are open about our process, because a reader deserves to know where the words came from.
The angle
Facts come first, and only from open, checkable sources: MusicBrainz, Wikidata, Wikipedia and Cover Art Archive. Dates, catalog numbers and chart positions are taken from those records, never from memory.
Verification
Drafts are written with the help of AI, working strictly from that collected set of facts. The model is not asked what it knows — it is asked to retell what we already verified.
Editing
Every draft is read by a person before it goes out. Roughly a third of them never make it: they are rejected for a wrong fact, a dull angle, or language that reads like a machine wrote it.
Numbers
Numbers are checked separately. If a figure in the text cannot be traced back to a source, the story is sent back rather than published with a footnote.
STRAIGHT TALK
How we handle data
ARTWORK
Article artwork comes from freely licensed sources (such as Wikimedia Commons), with attribution on every image. AI illustrations are always labeled. No Discogs covers, and no AI-generated portraits of artists. We show release covers from the Cover Art Archive with a link to the source: the rights to the image itself stay with the copyright holder.
DATA
Release data is checked against permitted Discogs fields and open CC0 data from MusicBrainz, under the rules of each source.
TOOLS
The speed check is an estimate from the phone gyroscope, not a calibrated measuring instrument.
PROMISES
We keep it honest: if a feature isn’t in the stores yet, we say so.
CORRECTIONS
We do. Tell us and we’ll correct the story or take it down — that’s what the contact page is for, and it’s the fastest way to reach a human.
LANGUAGES
Each language edition of CrateCore is written separately — nothing here is machine-translated from another version. Switch languages anytime from the menu.
THE TEAM
A small team and one editorial calendar
We are not a press office or an aggregator. If a date, pressing detail or source is wrong, we correct the story and note the change.