Song Seal

A permanent, append-only record of when a piece of music existed.

No records exist yet. This domain is live and empty on purpose. When the first song is sealed it will appear at songseal.org/artist/song, and it will still be here in twenty years.

What a record contains

What is never in a record

How to check a record without us

Published now, before there is anything to check, because the promise is that you can verify a record without our help — and a promise you can only read about afterwards is worth less than one you can read about first.

1. Download the file the record describes.
2. Run:  sha256sum yourfile.wav
3. Compare the digest to the one printed on the record.
   Identical means these are the same bytes.

4. The record's date is anchored two ways, so it can be checked
   against parties who have never heard of us:

   OpenTimestamps   ots verify record.ots
                    resolves to a Bitcoin block header.
   RFC 3161         openssl ts -verify -in record.tsr -CAfile chain.pem
                    the certificate chain is stored IN the record,
                    not linked, so it still verifies when the
                    timestamp authority is gone.

Or use the checker

The same steps, automated. It is one file, it has no dependencies, and it reads only files you already have — so it keeps working if this site does not.

curl -O https://songseal.org/verify.mjs
node verify.mjs record.json yourfile.wav

Two honest limits. This copy is served by the same host that serves the records, so it is a convenience, not an independent check — the standard commands above owe us nothing and are the stronger path. And for anchors the checker prints the external commands to run rather than reaching a verdict of its own, because our verdict about our own dates would be worth nothing.

A record proves this exact file existed by this date and has not changed since. It does not prove authorship, it is not a copyright registration, and nobody here reviews it. A single seal is weak evidence; the trail of seals across time is the evidence.