A record shop for music that does not exist. Every artist, label and album here was invented — the sleeves, the sleeve notes, the interviews, the songs. None of it happened. All of it plays.
Everyone is already doing some of this
Producers have been using these tools for a while and mostly not mentioning it. It seems to be a bit of an open secret. Every era of recorded music has had a machine in it that somebody would rather not discuss — the click track, the comped vocal, the tuning. And nobody has ever really believed a pop star's image arrived unassisted; the manufacture has always been part of the story, and the people doing it are good at their jobs.
So the question was never whether a record could be generated. It was what happens when all of it is and nobody pretends otherwise. Does that make it any less "music"?
I don't really have an answer. I keep changing my mind, usually when it drops a song that sounds fantastic and makes you feel something.
It is an experiment in AI production
Sidetrax started as a question about process rather than about music: how far can you get by treating a record label as a pipeline? Not one model doing everything, but several — different models for lyrics, for arrangement notes, for artwork, for the prose on the back of the sleeve — handed between agents and workflows that each know one job. One writes a brief. One argues with it. One records. One files the paperwork. The catalogue you are browsing is the output of that pipeline, and the app around it exists because the output needed somewhere to live.
The recordings themselves are made with Suno. If you fancy making your own, that is an invite link — signing up through it earns us both credits, which is the closest thing this label has to a recoupable advance.
What came out was not what I expected
Some of it is tongue in cheek, and unapologetically so — there are jokes in here, and band names nobody should have to defend. Some of it turned out surprisingly, awkwardly moving, which was never the plan. Mostly it is music I wanted to listen and thought it would be fun to make.
None of this exists without real musicians
Every note of it is downstream of people who learned an instrument, hauled an amp up a fire escape, and played to a room of eleven. The models have heard all of them. I have not stopped being aware of that, and this page is the wrong place to be coy about it. I toy with making music the old way, some of my family are professional musicians. Much in the same way many industries are battling for their jobs, musicians are fighting for their livelihoods. Please support them.
So: go to a small venue this month. Pay the door. Buy the record and the ugly t-shirt from the merch table at the back, because that is the part the band actually gets. Follow someone local. Turn up on the wet Tuesday.
This may not be real. Music is.