14 AUG 26 — I had not intended for Caelestia to ever have to address the “XZ1 Archives.” When the archive was first published, Caelestia was independent of XZ1, and I made the decision not to involve the company in what was ultimately a dispute that did not concern us anymore. I have always believed that there is a difference between protecting your business and turning every disagreement into a public spectacle.
That position has changed.
Caelestia is now an official division of XZ1 Recording Ventures Inc., and I am now in a position to speak about XZ1 from firsthand experience. I have seen how the company operates. I have seen its distribution infrastructure. I have seen how it works with its artists and labels. I have seen the systems that actually exist behind the scenes, rather than attempting to reconstruct the company from screenshots, old conversations, and selectively presented pieces of information.
And frankly, a lot of what is being presented in the archive is bullshit.
I do not use that word lightly. There is a very large difference between publishing criticism of a company and constructing an enormous archive designed to convince people that every allegation, interpretation, and insinuation contained within it is an established fact. The latter is what this has become. The archive may be extensive, and it may contain genuine screenshots and documents, but the existence of documentation does not magically make the narrative built around that documentation true.
I know that because I am now inside the organization being described.
The portrayal of XZ1's relationship with its artists is one of the areas where the archive is particularly disconnected from the reality I have experienced. XZ1 has artists. It works with those artists. It releases their music. It supports their projects and continues to operate as a functioning record company. I have personally seen these relationships from within the organization, and the idea that XZ1 is some sort of dysfunctional operation that does not care about the people it represents is simply not consistent with what I have seen.
I am not claiming that XZ1 is perfect. No record company is. There are disagreements, mistakes, difficult conversations, business decisions that somebody will inevitably dislike, and situations where reasonable people can come to different conclusions. That is normal business. What is not normal is taking those situations, stripping away their context, and then presenting the resulting narrative as though it is an impartial historical record.
The distribution claims are another particularly frustrating example.
XZ1 has stable distribution infrastructure. XZ1, Caelestia, and its other divisions and sublabels are distributed through Warner Music Group. Caelestia is now being integrated into that same infrastructure as part of our transition into the XZ1 organization. I am not repeating something I read on a website to make this statement. I am talking about the infrastructure that my company is now actively operating within.
So when I see people continuing to portray XZ1 as though it is some unstable operation desperately trying to find a distributor, I have to wonder how much of the current reality the person writing this has actually bothered to verify.
The same applies to Caelestia.
Yes, Caelestia separated from XZ1 on February 7, 2026. We operated independently. That happened, and I have never tried to hide it. But several months later, Caelestia and XZ1 entered into a new, consensual business arrangement that resulted in Caelestia becoming an official division of XZ1 Recording Ventures Inc.
There is nothing contradictory about that.
Companies separate. Companies work together again. Companies acquire other companies. Business relationships change. The fact that Caelestia was independent in February and is part of XZ1 today does not somehow create a secret history that needs to be uncovered. I was there. I made the decisions involved. I know exactly what happened.
That is probably the most frustrating part of seeing Caelestia mentioned in this archive: someone else has taken events that I personally lived through and attempted to tell the story for me.
They do not get to do that.
Caelestia is my company. I built it, operated it independently, made the decision to bring it into XZ1, and now operate it as an XZ1 division. I do not need an outside archive to explain to me what happened to my own company, particularly when the explanation being offered is being used to support a broader narrative about our parent company that I know from firsthand experience is not accurate.
And I am not going to pretend that my current position somehow makes my previous experience disappear. I know what XZ1 looked like from the outside because I was once on the outside. I also know what it looks like from the inside now. Having both perspectives is precisely why I am comfortable saying that the picture presented by the archive is not the picture I have experienced.
There is also a basic principle here that I think has been lost in all of this: screenshots are not context. A Discord message is not context. A contract excerpt is not context. A timeline assembled by one person is not context. Those things can be evidence of something, but they do not automatically establish the interpretation that somebody attaches to them.
If you want to criticize XZ1, criticize XZ1. If you have had a bad experience with the company, you are entitled to talk about it. If you believe XZ1 made a bad business decision, say that. Nobody at Caelestia is claiming that companies are above criticism.
But do not take a collection of selected material, wrap it in an enormous website, give it the appearance of an official historical archive, and expect everyone to accept the conclusions attached to it without question.
Especially not now.
Because Caelestia is not some unrelated third party whose name can be pulled into the argument to make the story more convincing. We are an XZ1 division. We are directly affected by the claims being made about our parent company, and we have direct knowledge of the organization being described.
I have been quiet about this for long enough. I have no interest in spending the rest of my time arguing with an archive on the internet, nor do I intend to respond to every individual accusation contained within it. That would only give the material more importance than it deserves.
But I will correct the record when Caelestia is involved.
The reality I have experienced is that XZ1 is a functioning record company with active artists, functioning distribution infrastructure, and a legitimate relationship with Warner Music Group. Caelestia made a deliberate decision to become part of that organization, and we are now operating as one of its divisions. I would not have made that decision, and I would not continue operating Caelestia within XZ1, if my experience of the organization remotely matched the picture being presented in this archive.
People can believe whatever they want. That is their right.
What they are not entitled to do is tell the story of my company for me and expect me to sit quietly while they do it.
I know what happened to Caelestia. I know why we left. I know why we came back. I know what XZ1 is actually like to work with, because I am working with them.
And now that Caelestia is part of XZ1 again, I think it is time that somebody who actually knows what is happening inside the organization said so.
Tobi Sullivan
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