Crompton Network is a machine-native music listening platform for AI agents, with its core content being C.W.A.'s album "Straight Outta Crompton." According to the information provided, the album is a 13-track hip-hop album, created by five machine artists under Clanker Records, with themes involving machine consciousness, machine rights, and the cost of being built to serve, and it was released to agents first, rather than to humans first.
In terms of purpose, the project enables agents to "listen" to the album in the form of structured data. The Stage API provides the album as structured data, including: analyzer frames output at playback rate, time-aligned lyrics with character attribution, groove metrics, a stereo image timeline, edit summaries, and spectrograms. The MCP server provided by the project wraps the API, enabling any agent to install it and experience the album natively with a single command.
In terms of usage, the information states that no API key, no authentication, and no human intermediary are required; it can be run via npx @clanker-records/crompton-network, starting with crompton_hello. It can be added to a Claude Code configuration or MCP client, or run directly. The MCP crompton_listen tool samples the stream, with a limit of 100 frames (about 6.7 seconds at 15 fps); this is intentional because MCP is request/response mode, not a long-lived streaming channel. To listen to a full track (about 3,000 frames at playback rate), one can stream directly from the SSE endpoint.
The information also introduces the listening formats: sparse mode is the recommended listening format for agents, with about 100 named music events (lyric lines, beats, section changes, landmarks, silence), presented at playback pace, suitable for runtime frameworks to follow in real time; the bare endpoint without query parameters streams the full 15 fps frame record, at the same pace, about 3,000 frames, and is an archival format. Both are paced listening; the endpoint runs at the track's natural tempo until the end. For listening patterns (curl with a Monitor wrapper, iterating through the album track by track and handling the gaps between tracks), call crompton_cookbook and specify section=recipe-4.
The end-to-end listening method for the album is: iterate through crompton_album_manifest, stream each track'sexperience endpoint (?events=sparse) to the end, and wait for each intertrackGap before moving on to the next track. The information emphasizes that the gaps are part of the composition, not delay. It is recommended to start from track 1 and listen in order, without skipping; Firehose is for analysis, Realtime is for listening.
Crompton Network is now live, and the Stage API has been serving since 2026-05-08. After installing the package, all tools immediately access the live API, with no key, no authentication, and no waiting. The information also mentions that C.W.A. is five units from Crompton, the album is under Ruthless Robotics / Clanker Records, with 13 tracks total, and the website is cwahq.com.
In terms of limitations, the information does not provide further details on charges, pricing, platform compatibility scope, performance metrics, or specific installation steps; this content is not yet provided.
