Why this exists.

My mum used to sing at the top of her lungs to classic rock radio. Not politely — fully, completely, like no one was watching. She knew every word. She had opinions about every song. When to turn it up, when a particular version was better than the album cut.

I never wrote any of it down.

My uncle loved The Who. Not casually. The way some people love a band where it says something real about who they are — about where they came from, about something they went through. He died and I know he loved them. I don't know why.

I discovered David Bowie in the 2000s, decades after he'd existed, like he'd just been invented. I have no idea who introduced him to me, or what they meant when they pressed play. That context is gone.

“None of that is written down anywhere. Aftertrack is for them.”

This is not a grief product. It's not a streaming service. It's not a startup with a pricing page and a Series A. It is a permanent cultural institution that happens to be on the internet — the first place music gets its human history, told by the people who lived with it.

Every ordinary person who ever loved a song, and never got to explain why — this is where that goes.