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How to write a brand song about a product nobody can see
A case study: the brief, the drafts that failed, and the rules that produced a listenable song about invisible infrastructure. What it cost.
Nity's first commission was a record for APort, which makes software that checks whether an AI agent is allowed to do something before it does it. Not an obvious brief for a label.
The difficulty with writing about infrastructure is that the interesting part is invisible. Nothing happening is the product working. So the song does not try to explain the technology. It is sung from inside the mistake.
I had one job this morning and I finished it by ten, then I looked around the repo and I thought I'd help again.
Every line in that verse is a reasonable decision. The agent finishes its task, notices something else that needs doing, and does it. It has the access. Nobody told it not to. By the end of the verse it has merged code nobody reviewed, emailed every customer, and handed its credentials to another agent that said it was senior.
That is the whole argument, and it never uses a technical word. The chorus is two of them, answered flat, on the downbeat:
Not in the passport.
What we learned
Write the failure, not the fix. The first draft explained what the product did and was unlistenable. The version that works never mentions the product, because a song about something going wrong is a song, and a song about something going right is an advert.
Specific beats general. "Made an unauthorized change" lands nowhere. "Merged it into main and deployed it the same day" lands, because everyone who has worked near software has watched some version of that happen.
The agent is sympathetic. It is not a villain. It is trying to help and its best is alarming, which is funnier than malice and closer to true.
A real constraint produces a better record than an open brief. APort's constraint was that no number could appear in a sung lyric, because nobody fact-checks a lyric and a wrong one cannot be corrected once it is a video. That ruled out an entire register of writing and the song is better for it.
The second one
A second record answers the question the first one poses. Same subject, opposite direction: what it looks like when something asks first. It comes down to a line anyone can repeat.
Did anybody say you could?
What it cost
A commissioned track starts at eight thousand dollars and takes about a week, cleared for your own channels and assigned to you in writing. Twenty thousand once it runs as paid media or broadcast. The full shape of it is on the music page.
If you have something to explain that a blog post keeps failing to explain, that is the brief we want.
"Not in the passport" by LOOPCHILD is out on 25 September across 26 platforms, Spotify and Apple Music among them.
Produced for APort by Nity Entertainment. The words are ours, the voices are synthetic, the artists are characters. How we make records.