One year ago today, we announced Oscillator as an open protocol for music data. The idea was that artists and fans should own their history—not platforms. That their likes, follows, and discoveries should move freely across apps, instead of being locked inside them.
It was a good idea. But it wasn’t the full picture.
Over the last year, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve built and shipped FanScore, Poke, Factory.fm—apps designed to explore music identity, social graphs, and discovery. And through that process, the scope of Oscillator became much bigger than music.
The Core Shift: From Music to Memory
If you spend enough time thinking about who should own music data, you end up thinking about who should own data, period.
Right now, our digital history is fragile. Platforms disappear. Accounts get banned. Playlists, bookmarks, saved posts—gone. And even when platforms don’t erase things, they force you to start from scratch every time you join something new.
Oscillator is about solving this. Not just for music, but for everything:
The songs you loved in 2018.
The books you read in college.
The movies you rated on Letterboxd.
The tweets and posts that shaped your thinking.
We forget more than we remember, and our digital past shouldn’t be this disposable.
What’s Next?
We haven’t shipped this yet.
What we have today are early apps, but they don’t yet deliver on the core promise of data portability. That changes soon.
The Oscillator app is coming to Base. It will be the first step toward giving people a persistent, portable digital memory—one that belongs to you, not the platforms they use.
Less talk, more shipping. More soon.
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