Introducing Kapell
Streaming flattened the album into a stream of anonymous audio. Kapell starts as a calmer way to play the Apple Music® library you already have — then surrounds the music with the people, samples, and history behind it.
I love music. More than that, I love learning about the music I’m enjoying. I’m a hip-hop nerd in particular, and the genre has a deep history of sampling, production, and remixing — there’s always a story behind the song, and I want to know that story.
I grew up reading album notes: who featured, who produced, who wrote the hook. Not just to know, but to find more music. A single session musician, background vocalist, sample, or producer could become a thread to pull — and following it pulled me into whole eras and genres I wasn’t alive for.
The notes didn’t disappear. They got unbundled.
I’ve lived through the whole arc — CDs, MP3s, streaming. I love how available music is now. But somewhere along the way the story got consolidated behind platforms and quietly left out of the box. So I went back to doing it by hand: digging through Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and Genius to catch a slippery lyric or figure out who produced a track.
Recently it hit me that the digging didn’t have to be so manual. Volunteers at MusicBrainz have spent two decades cataloguing exactly who did what on millions of recordings, down to the breaks one song borrowed from another. Wikipedia holds the history. Wikidata and Genius fill in around the edges.
Kapell’s whole job is to gather them back into the one place you’re already looking: the song playing right now.
The liner notes were never destroyed — they were just scattered across a dozen tabs.
Meet Kapell
So I built the thing I wanted. Kapell rides on the Apple Music subscription you already have and surrounds it with the context — made by a music lover, for the love of it. It adds things like Crates and the Listen Log to go deeper than a play button ever will: the kind of features a service built for everyone will probably never bother to ship.
Why now
Because the tools to do this well finally exist — the open data is there, the catalog is in your pocket — and because the alternative is a small, quiet loss that adds up: a whole generation of listeners who never learn the name of the person who played the part they love.
Press play. Meet the band.