About CrateCore
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.
What we publish
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.
How a story is made
We are open about our process, because a reader deserves to know where the words came from.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
About the images
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are credited under the picture with their license. Record sleeves are shown from Cover Art Archive. Where no free photograph exists, the illustration is generated by AI — those images are decorative, and they never depict a real person or a real album cover.
When we get it wrong
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. Contact CrateCore →
Languages
CrateCore is published in English and Russian. The two editions are written separately, not machine-translated from one another.