### Author:  [@hds](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/hds)
#### Post date: [February 25, 2019, 3:36am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/1 "2019-02-25T03:36:31Z")
I see that Musixmatch has been added to the Lyrics URL Whitelist:
> **[Style/Relationships/URLs/Lyrics whitelist - MusicBrainz Wiki](https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Relationships/URLs/Lyrics_whitelist)**
It works when I add a Musixmatch band URL as a band profile relationship.
It also works when I add a Musicmatch lyric URL to a Works page relationship.
But when I try to add a Musixmatch album URL to a Release Group, I guess this error: This URL is not allowed for the selected link type, or is incorrectly formatted.
The left-handed drop-down menu automatically chooses the type “lyrics page” but that error comes up.
Is this a known bug or is it blocked for a reason?
---
### Author:  [@Freso](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/Freso)
#### Post date: [February 25, 2019, 7:17am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/2 "2019-02-25T07:17:20Z")
In the relevant ticket, @reosarevok only posted [example URLs for works and artists](https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-3643?focusedCommentId=36369&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-36369), so presumably those were the only ones known to exist.
I’ve filed a ticket on your behalf here:
>
If you can add an example Musixmatch album URL in a comment on the ticket, that would be great. 🙂
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### Author:  [@reosarevok](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/reosarevok)
#### Post date: [February 25, 2019, 7:35am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/3 "2019-02-25T07:35:33Z")
This seems pretty terrible: [Nine Inch Nails albums | Musixmatch](https://www.musixmatch.com/artist/Nine-Inch-Nails/albums) - a ton of dupes and whatnot. But still, I guess we should allow it. On it.
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### Author:  [@hds](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/hds)
#### Post date: [February 25, 2019, 1:34pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/4 "2019-02-25T13:34:30Z")
I can testify first-hand that the Musixmatch staff are not qualified metadata specialists. I’ve gone back and forth with them over email about dozens of mistakes in my bands’ albums, duplicates, incorrect titles, wrong album affiliation and track order. They’d fix half of the issues brought up, but along the way created new ones and seemingly threw in new song spelling mistakes in there out of spite. I finally reached out to the management team and they completely ignored my emails. I’m surprised that the website was whitelisted to begin with considering all of that, but I do understand that a lot of big streaming services use their database.
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### Author:  [@yvanzo](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/yvanzo)
#### Post date: [February 25, 2019, 8:41pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/5 "2019-02-25T20:41:22Z")
Musixmatch album pages have been intentionally left aside because it is very messy, it actually matches MusicBrainz releases more than MusicBrainz release groups.
Just checking the above example:
> [@reosarevok](#):
>
> This seems pretty terrible: [https://www.musixmatch.com/artist/Nine-Inch-Nails/albums](https://www.musixmatch.com/artist/Nine-Inch-Nails/albums) - a ton of dupes and whatnot.
Musixmatch has six entries for Capital G album:
1. [https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G)
2. [https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-2](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-2)
3. [https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-3](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-3)
4. [https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-4](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-4)
5. [https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-5](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-5)
6. [https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-6](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Nine-Inch-Nails/Capital-G-6)
Whereas MusicBrainz has six releases for [Capital G](https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/4cb48ab2-5e3d-3053-bf92-11a327bfbd70) single.
---
### Author:  [@Freso](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/Freso)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 9:33am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/6 "2019-02-26T09:33:18Z")
> [@yvanzo](#):
>
> intentionally
Intention is hard to know when it’s not communicated on tickets etc. I didn’t see Mxm albums being mentioned (at all) on neither the STYLE nor the MBS ticket.
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### Author:  [@yvanzo](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/yvanzo)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 9:50am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/7 "2019-02-26T09:50:08Z")
It’s been communicated on GitHub in [pull request’s description](https://github.com/metabrainz/musicbrainz-server/pull/613#issue-169751787) linked from [ticket’s comment](https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-3643?focusedCommentId=45367#comment-45367), and approved by Style BDFL. And there is a test case to specifically reject album pages. But I agree I should have updated ticket description after resolution.
As for the error message being not explicit enough, this is a known issue:
>
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### Author:  [@reosarevok](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/reosarevok)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 10:04am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/8 "2019-02-26T10:04:03Z")
FWIW, I’m pretty sure what I approved was linking to mxm, rather than specifically the album bit 🙂
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### Author:  [@reosarevok](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/reosarevok)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 10:25am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/9 "2019-02-26T10:25:36Z")
In general: it’s unclear to me whether mxm tries to have a page for every album version, or just are shit but we should assume they mean RGs. @hds, when they fixed your reports, did they merge duplicates in a way that suggested they actually meant to have one entry per album, rather than per version, even if they are shit at it?
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### Author:  [@yvanzo](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/yvanzo)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 11:10am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/10 "2019-02-26T11:10:59Z")
> [@Freso](#):
>
> I didn’t see Mxm albums being mentioned (at all) on neither the STYLE nor the MBS ticket.
Just updated tickets [STYLE-518](https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/STYLE-518) and [MBS-3643](https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-3643) to match the actual implementation.
> [@reosarevok](#):
>
> FWIW, I’m pretty sure what I approved was linking to mxm, rather than specifically the album bit 🙂
You may just have missed that line 🙂 I’m pretty good at it too! And _albums_ not _being mentioned (at all)_ also mean they were not explicitely requested either, the [only given examples](https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-3643?focusedCommentId=36369#comment-36369) were about artist and work, I probably assumed you made the same statement than I did on albums.
> [@reosarevok](#):
>
> t’s unclear to me whether mxm tries to have a page for every album version, or just are shit but we should assume they mean RGs.
I’m more inclined to assume that album pages are just raw imported MB releases, see [https://www.musixmatch.com/album/MusicBrainz-Test-Artist/MBS-2755-2](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/MusicBrainz-Test-Artist/MBS-2755-2) (Edit: replaced with correct example)
In general: Not linking to album pages is not really an issue as it is redundant with direct links from works and Musixmatch album pages don’t contain any additional data (release date most probably comes from MusicBrainz too). Instead, we should probably display work lyrics links in release/recording pages.
---
### Author:  [@hds](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/hds)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 4:54pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/11 "2019-02-26T16:54:43Z")
> @hds, when they fixed your reports, did they merge duplicates in a way that suggested they actually meant to have one entry per album, rather than per version, even if they are shit at it?
That’s hard to tell because three of my bands are on Musixmatch (Vision Eternel, Vision Lunar, Soufferance) and only one of them got close to being fully corrected (Vision Eternel). I must have gone through 20 emails for the first band alone before the moderators ignored my emails. The issues with my other two bands have gone unresolved.
One example is here:
> **[Vision Lunar lyrics | Musixmatch](https://www.musixmatch.com/artist/Vision-Lunar)**
>
> All Vision Lunar lyrics sorted by popularity, with video and meanings.
> **[Vision Lunar feat. Alexandre Julien lyrics | Musixmatch](https://www.musixmatch.com/artist/Vision-Lunar-feat-Alexandre-Julien)**
>
> All Vision Lunar feat. Alexandre Julien lyrics sorted by popularity, with video and meanings.
In the case of my band above, they have refused to merge these two artists together. In the second one, they have me (Alex Julien), the band member, listed as a featured artist rather than correctly as Vision Lunar, the band alone.
A second example is this:
> **[Bonjour Tristesse by Soufferance album lyrics | Musixmatch](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Soufferance/Bonjour-Tristesse)**
>
> All the lyrics and translations to the album Bonjour Tristesse by Soufferance
> **[Bonjour Tristesse by Soufferance album lyrics | Musixmatch](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Soufferance/Bonjour-Tristesse-2)**
>
> All the lyrics and translations to the album Bonjour Tristesse by Soufferance
> **[Bonjour Tristesse by Soufferance album lyrics | Musixmatch](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Soufferance/Bonjour-Tristesse-3)**
>
> All the lyrics and translations to the album Bonjour Tristesse by Soufferance
For Soufferance, one of my albums is listed 3 times, with the same track listing, but with different dates.
This is what Musixmatch told me in an email reply from in 2017 (they’re Italian so English is not their forte):
> We have three sources for album data: Itunes, Spotify and Musicbrainz.
> If data are not correct, we need to fix it there.
However, I do want to mention that the statement above is not entirely true because I know for a fact that my albums’ cover arts and titles were originally pulled from the old Last.fm discography pages. I’ve always maintained my MusicBrainz band pages well, and the releases up on iTunes and Spotify were freshly added to their services. So I had to deal directly with Musixmatch via email, and send them new high resolution images for each release so that they could update their database.
Back in 2017, they were more friendly and willing to work with verified bands to get things fixed. But the last email that I received from them in 2018 was this:
> The Architecture of our Database and cannot be changed.
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### Author:  [@outsidecontext](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/outsidecontext)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 5:16pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/12 "2019-02-26T17:16:37Z")
It’s also interesting how one of the albums, [https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Soufferance/Bonjour-Tristesse](https://www.musixmatch.com/album/Soufferance/Bonjour-Tristesse) , shows a full track listing of 8 tracks, but next to the release year it states “1 songs”. I wonder what kind of database architecture causes something like this…
IMHO it’s hard to link to this data meaningfully from MusicBrainz. On the other hand they seem to have related quite some data to MusicBrainz IDs and using their API you can actually query by MBIDs. So they must have some logic here. This is what their [documentation](https://developer.musixmatch.com/documentation/input-parameters) says:
**track\_mbid** musicbrainz recording or track id
**artist\_mbid** musicbrainz artist id
**album\_mbid** musicbrainz release id
This would indicate they are actually using releases, not release groups. But I’m not too sure this is true. In any way, they end up with many duplicated albums.
On a side note: You make some great music!
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### Author:  [@rdswift](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/rdswift)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 6:04pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/13 "2019-02-26T18:04:57Z")
> [@outsidecontext](#):
>
> I wonder what kind of database architecture causes something like this…
A really poor one? 😉
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### Author:  [@reosarevok](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/reosarevok)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2019, 8:50pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/musixmatch-relationship-not-working/418276/14 "2019-02-26T20:50:33Z")
> [@outsidecontext](#):
>
> This is what their [documentation](https://developer.musixmatch.com/documentation/input-parameters) says:
>
> **track\_mbid** musicbrainz recording or track id
> **artist\_mbid** musicbrainz artist id
> **album\_mbid** musicbrainz release id
>
> This would indicate they are actually using releases, not release groups. But I’m not too sure this is true. In any way, they end up with many duplicated albums.
In that case it might make sense to not link to their album pages - it’s a shame though because at least for me (I usually want lyrics when listening to an album for the first time, and then I listen to the whole thing in one go) that’d be the most useful page, but if it doesn’t match it doesn’t match…