Songlinks
Linking songwriter records to a single human being.
Look up a writer Beta See two real answers
Songlinks is in beta. Its answers are a model’s grouping of records from one rights database, not checked by a person, and not for decisions about rights or royalties.
One songwriter is never one record. They are scattered across rights databases under a legal name, a married name, a romanisation, a misspelling, a stage name — each with its own slice of the catalogue, and nothing saying they are the same person.
Songlinks puts them back together, and shows its evidence. Two real answers:
Examples
Recorded from the model on 2026‑09‑13.
Technology
This is not a chatbot. Ask a general-purpose AI whether two songwriter records are the same person and it will answer fluently every time, including when it has nothing to go on. It cannot see the catalogue behind the names, it will not always give the same answer twice, and the confidence it expresses is not measured against anything. Identity is exactly the problem where plausible and correct are not the same thing.
A model trained for this one question. Songlinks does not ask a general-purpose model to be clever about names. It uses a model trained for this one decision, on a large body of examples of that decision being made. It is repeatable, and its confidence is measured rather than asserted: the same question gives the same answer, and a given number means the same thing every time it appears. The examples above show the rest of the rule — a score on its own never joins two records, and a pair the evidence cannot settle is left unmerged and said to be unsettled.
Measured against the leading public lookup
In September 2026 we asked Songlinks and the leading public songwriter lookup about the same 240 writers, drawn at random in three separate draws, and checked both against the registry’s own records. The questions and the pass mark were fixed before either answered.
Figures from the comparison run 2026‑09‑15.
We also measured two questions where we are not ahead. On telling apart different people who share a name, neither lookup came out better. On recognising one person across several registrations, the leading public lookup is ahead, drawing on an outside database. We are working to close that gap using records we can check.
What it will not do
- It does not find money. It resolves identity — not what you are owed, and not what a catalogue is worth.
- It claims nothing on anyone’s behalf. The output is evidence about identity, never a determination of ownership.
- It can be confidently wrong. A stage name that reads like a legal name returns a small, real-looking catalogue belonging to someone else, and nothing in the answer marks it as different from a right one.
Permanent identifiers
Every person Songlinks identifies has an identifier that is never deleted or reused, and a page of its own. If two identifiers turn out to be the same person, one redirects to the other, permanently.
Look up any writer by name, against the live data. Free, and nothing to sign up for.
If this is useful to you
The question worth answering is which of these you would actually use: a lookup, an audit of a whole roster, or something that watches for changes. alex@songlinks.to.