Songwriting Credits

I’m a beginner developer making a website in which users can upload songs. I’m going to put these songs through a fingerprinting api (like arccloud), which will validate the name of the song the user puts in.

I also need an API that returns the songwriting credits (royalty receivers) of the song.

You guys have the Artist Credits, which hopefully returns the songwriters for a given song? I need to validate the songwriters the user puts in for their uploaded songs, and I’m researching a way to do that.

The majority of songs that will be uploaded will be previously unreleased, so I can turn the process around and input all unrecognised songs in your database.

Does any of this sound feasible? I’m using Rails to build the site.

You’ll probably be more interested in works than recordings (which are where you’re seeing the artist credits), and the writer/composer/lyricist relationships attached to them. Unfortunately, a lot of songs don’t have their works in the database and instead are just present as recordings.

I also have no idea what the backend looks like, and what is involved in getting a service like that approved.

There is also https://acoustid.org/ that will fingerprint a songs to find the musicbrainz recording id if someone has submitted this data.
From that you can look up the musicbrainz database and find the work id for that recording.

Our database do have writing credits but we do not guarantee it to be complete and accurate.
It is not something we would recommend you base royalty payments on as it may not have a record or may credit the wrong person.

[quote=“daveasdf, post:1, topic:246708”]…The majority of songs that will be uploaded will be previously unreleased…[/quote]Are you sure that you will find any online information at all?
If this songs are previously unreleased, how can you assume that someone else has already entered informations about it?

(Emphasis mine.) Note that MusicBrainz gives no guarantees or warranty what-so-ever of the correctness or completeness of the data. (See our Social Contract.)

The data is great for showing relationships and giving information about work writers and such, but it is not useful for any legally binding situations, such as determining how to hand out royalties. That world is far too convoluted and hidden away in the shadows for us to be able to have any useful insights, and additionally far beyond the scope of MB.

Note that there is no web service endpoint for adding data currently. It would be great to have more Works and Work related data though, so if something could be worked out, that could be nice. As someone else said though, you likely won’t get many recognised songs if they haven’t been released yet. :slight_smile:

Hi all, thanks for the replies. Since the post I’ve changed tactics a bit, as I’ve discovered what’s been mentioned here - there is no all encompassing database of song creditors (or royalty receivers). Each PRO has its own complete database of its members of course, but generally they do not make the info accessible. So I’m going to use a fingerprinting API such as ARCCloud to verify the name of the audio file, and outside of that rely on some pretty hefty EULAs and user reporting for scammers. Thanks!

Dave