Permanent Index is a place to keep the music that matters to you, at an address you own.
You build collections — albums and tracks you’ve decided are worth keeping — and each one lives at a permanent public URL. Not a playlist locked inside an app, but a page that’s yours, that you can share, export, and take with you regardless of what you listen on.
The idea is simple: the moment you decide to keep something is where your taste actually lives. Not what played in the background — what you chose, and why. That decision, and the context around it, is the thing worth recording. Most platforms throw it away. We make it the point.
A collection here isn’t a feed of activity or a number going up. It’s a considered record: what you kept, in what company, and what it meant to you when you kept it. The note you write explaining a choice is as much the content as the music itself.
Everything is keyed to MusicBrainz identifiers, and every collection is cached so it renders from our own data — your page doesn’t break if an outside service goes down or disappears.
Your collections and playlists are yours to take. Everything you build here exports cleanly — to a spreadsheet, a file, or a format you can carry into any other service. There’s no lock-in. The work you do is meant to outlast the tools that made it.
That permanence is a deliberate choice, not a feature. Curation that can vanish when a company changes its terms isn’t really yours. This is.
Permanent Index is built on MusicBrainz — an open, community-built music database that exists because people believed music metadata should belong to the public rather than a private company. MusicBrainz was started in 2000 by Rob Kaye, after the freely-contributed CDDB database was privatised and sold. He spent the next twenty-five years building the open alternative.
Rob Kaye died in February 2026. Permanent Index would not exist without the database he built, and it’s built in the same spirit: that a record of how people hear and value music should belong to the people who made it, and should last.
In memory of Rob Kaye, 1970–2026. If you value open music data, consider donating to MusicBrainz.