Use Claude as the AI assistant for your books, films, music and concerts (2026)

MyCultBox connects to your own Claude account, so you can ask Claude in plain language to search your books, films, music and concerts, fill in missing descriptions and tags, add new items and build lists. It needs a MyCultBox Pro subscription and a Claude account of any plan.

What you can ask Claude to do with your library

Claude gets 40 tools over one library: your personal Box, not the Box you have open in the app. Grouped by what you would ask:

Find things. Claude can take stock first — items per category, how much is rated, how much has no description — then search: free text, category, tag, past or upcoming, a minimum rating, or the gaps: items missing a description, a rating or tags. It can open one item in full, and list your lists, tags with counts, the people you went with, the venues, an item's reviews, and what you played in the app's player.

Fill in the gaps. What it is best at: descriptions, ratings, titles, dates, a location, and each category's own fields — author and publisher for a book, director and runtime for a film, label and track count for an album, venue and tour for a concert. A description Claude writes is stored as assistant-written, so the app's enrichment will not quietly overwrite it.

Add new things. Claude looks a title up before creating anything — books through ISBNDB, Open Library and Apple Books, films and series through TMDB, albums through Spotify, Apple Music, Discogs and MusicBrainz — and builds the item from that exact release, so it arrives with cover, ids and details, enriched like one you added yourself. Those lookups share the website's daily limit, so a long batch can run out and resume tomorrow.

Organize. Lists: create, rename, describe, add, remove, reorder, delete. Tags: create, rename, attach, detach, delete. People: who you went with, which musicians played, which works were performed.

Reviews and notes. Give Claude a review's address and it attaches it to the item; the server usually fetches the article itself, so you get the piece and its lead image, not a summary. When the fetch is blocked — paywall, consent wall, bot check — Claude's summary stays as the body. It can write personal notes too.

Concerts, recaps and sharing. Claude can search setlist.fm by artist, city and year and attach a setlist to a concert, so the songs appear on its page. It can build your Year in Culture for one year or all time, and make an item or a list public, or private again — when you ask.

Why bring your own Claude instead of an AI built into the app

The reasoning runs on your own Claude account and MyCultBox adds no per-question charge. It does spend on the ordinary enrichment of items Claude creates — the same cover art, metadata and description work any new item gets — inside the monthly AI ceiling every account has.

Plenty of trackers build an AI in instead, and some do it well. The honest comparison, each app's store listing as the source:

StoryGraph says of its recommender: "Our machine learning AI is like your trusted go-to friend for book recommendations." Where it beats MyCultBox: browsing and filtering books by mood and pace, a genuinely different way to pick one, plus a barcode scanner, buddy reads and book clubs.
Bookshelf offers a "Book Chat": "chat with our AI librarian to generate summaries and flash cards, discuss key ideas". Where it beats MyCultBox: remembering what you read — note cards, scanning text out of a book, spaced-repetition quizzes on your notes, all starred in the listing as needing its paid Gold tier — in a native iPhone app, which MyCultBox is not.
Filmlog is the closest peer: on the Mac "a Claude Desktop extension reads your diary and writes to it when you ask", and on iOS 27 and macOS 27 "Siri AI answers questions about your library in plain language — not yet on iPhone and iPad in the EU". Where it beats MyCultBox: a native app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that searches 315,000 films with the internet switched off. MyCultBox does nothing offline.
Yondazo computes its reading insights on the phone through Apple Intelligence, "with nothing ever sent to the cloud". No remote connector can match that: connecting one means your library data goes to your Claude session.

The case for bringing your own is not that it is smarter: it is one assistant across all four categories, in a conversation you steer.

What you need

A MyCultBox Pro subscription. Not the free plan and not the 14-day trial: those can connect and see the list of tools, but every call is refused, with a message naming the paid Pro subscription.

A Claude account on any plan. Anthropic's documentation says custom connectors added by URL work on the Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, and that the Free plan allows one. On Team and Enterprise an Owner adds it for the organization; members then connect with their own account.

Connect in two minutes

One click. Open Connect to Claude, signing in to Claude first if it asks. The Add custom connector dialog opens with the name and address filled in and a red notice that they came from an external link; that is expected. Check that the address is https://www.mycultbox.com/mcp, click Continue, then click Add on the second screen.

By hand. In Claude, go to Customize → Connectors and choose Add → Add custom connector. Enter MyCultBox as the name and https://www.mycultbox.com/mcp as the address, click Continue, then click Add on the second screen. A Team or Enterprise Owner does it in Organization settings → Connectors → Add → Custom, choosing Web if it asks for a type.

On that second screen, leave what Claude detected: Sign in now, and Register automatically under OAuth client. Register automatically is Dynamic Client Registration, the only method MyCultBox supports, so do not choose Use Claude's published identity or Use your own OAuth client.

In Claude Code. Run claude mcp add --transport http mycultbox https://www.mycultbox.com/mcp, then type /mcp in a session, select mycultbox and choose Authenticate; your browser opens the MyCultBox consent page.

Other clients. Anything that cannot do OAuth can use an API token instead; the commands are on the API page in your account menu.

Every route above except the API token ends the same way: you sign in to MyCultBox and click Allow.

Prompts to try

Each of these works as written.

"Which films in my library don't have a rating yet?" — one search, filtered on films missing a rating.
"Add Jon Fosse's Septology to my books, rate it 9 and tag it norwegian." — Claude searches the book sources and creates the item from the release it found, with your rating and tag.
"Write a two-sentence, spoiler-free description for every book that has none." — ask for a handful first and read them before letting it loose on sixty.
"Show me all my tags with how many items carry each, and flag any near-duplicates." — the tag list comes back with counts, busiest first; noticing that sci-fi and scifi are one tag is Claude's part, and it can rename them.
"Make a list called Top films with my films rated 8 or higher." — a search on a minimum rating, a new list, the items added in one go.
"I saw Nick Cave in Antwerp last June — add the concert and attach the setlist." — it searches setlist.fm by artist, city and year and attaches the setlist you confirm.
"What have I played in the last week?" — the listening history from MyCultBox's own player, not Spotify or Apple Music.

Staying in control

The consent page says exactly what you grant: Claude can read and update your whole library — add, change and delete items, lists, tags, reviews and notes, and make items or lists public or private again — but nothing about your account, subscription or payment details.

On Claude's side you keep three controls. Open MyCultBox under Customize → Connectors and Claude lists its tools under Tool permissions in two groups, Read-only tools and Write/delete tools; each group has its own setting, and every tool can also be set on its own to Always allow, Needs approval or Blocked. Claude shows approval requests you can accept or refuse. You can switch the connector off for one conversation from the + button in the chat, under Connectors. And Anthropic's own advice is worth repeating: review tool approval requests carefully, click Always allow only for servers you trust, and be aware of prompt injection — a page or a description Claude reads can carry instructions aimed at it rather than at you.

Deleting is permanent — there is no trash can — so ask Claude to list what it will remove first, and consider setting the delete tools to Blocked.

Two things create something public, and they are not symmetrical. Claude makes an item or a list public only when you ask, and those can go back to private, in the app or by asking. Asking for a year-in-culture recap also creates a shareable link — the same one the recap page in the app gives you — but that one cannot be taken down: once it exists, anyone with the link can see the card once its images are generated.

To disconnect: in MyCultBox open the account menu, go to API, and use the Connected apps card. Access stops immediately; you can reconnect later.

Troubleshooting

Every tool call comes back refused. The message says the connector needs a paid MyCultBox Pro subscription, not included in the free plan or the 14-day trial.

Claude cannot reach the server. Check the address — https://www.mycultbox.com/mcp, including the /mcp path. Claude's Free plan allows one custom connector, so remove the other first. On Team and Enterprise only an Owner can add one; you then click Connect.

Claude shows Connection issue, or you disconnected. Nothing is lost. Open Customize → Connectors, select MyCultBox, click Reconnect (or Connect), sign in to MyCultBox and click Allow. If the entry is gone, add the connector again with the one-click link above. Do not add it a second time while the entry exists: Claude reuses the old entry and shows the same message. Anthropic's documentation notes that a connector's authentication settings cannot be changed after it is added: for those, remove it and add it again.

On your phone. Anthropic's support pages say installing connectors on mobile is in beta, with Claude Desktop and the web the primary path, and that a service you connect there shows up next time you sign in to Claude for iOS or Android. So set it up on a computer.

Anything else: [email protected].

What it does not do

The connector covers your library and the lookups around it, and stops there. Features that spend MyCultBox's own AI budget or run a browser stay in the app, where you trigger them: the critic-review fetch, recommendations, musician biographies, concert suggestions and series-season checks. Claude also cannot archive a webpage, clip an article, export a PDF, import a CSV or ZIP, upload a file, connect Apple Music or Spotify, or record a play.

Claude is a trademark of Anthropic. MyCultBox is an independent product and is not affiliated with Anthropic.