MuseOS

The problem

An independent artist owns their work and almost none of the machinery around it. Copyright registration, metadata standards, sync licensing, royalty collection — each is a separate system, most are built for labels, and the gaps between them are where money quietly fails to arrive.

MuseOS is an attempt to put those in one place: register the rights, hold the metadata to a standard that downstream platforms will actually accept, and track what is owed.

The design

Vermilion, charcoal and a warm off-white, with geometric artwork that reads as a record without ever drawing one literally. The sign-in screen splits light and dark down the middle — the marketing argument on one side, the form on the other — which lets the product introduce itself to a returning user without a separate landing page.

It is a deliberately warm palette for a rights-administration tool, and that is the right call. The competition in this category looks like accounting software, and the artists using it did not get into music to use accounting software.

Where the design system has drifted

There are two colour systems in the codebase and they do not agree. The brand lives in the Tailwind config — vermilion, yellow, charcoal, warm off-white. The semantic layer underneath is still shadcn's default: `--primary` is blue-600, and `--background` is a cool grey rather than the brand's warm off-white.

The practical effect is that any component reaching for `bg-primary` renders blue inside a vermilion brand, and two different whites are in play depending on which system a screen was built against.

One more, and it is the sharpest: `--success` and `--warning` are both hue 199. Warning is simply a lighter cyan than success. A warning that is the same hue as a success is not a warning — colour is carrying no information there at all.