Songwriter lookup: every registration of one writer, under every name and IPI

Linking songwriter records to a single human being.

Registration data as of 9 October 2026.

For songwriters checking their own registrations · managers and publishing admins · checking every writer in a CWR file

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 catalog, 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.

Holding more than one writer? The same answer runs over a whole roster at once. We sent a hundred real registered names through as a list: 48 of them also reached a different person who shares the name, and more than half the registrations found belonged to somebody else. Bulk songwriter lookup, for publishers, administrators and registries.

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 catalog 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, and again in October, 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 2026‑10‑23.

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 on this test — though the test draws its pairs from the outside database that lookup reads, so it measures how closely we reproduce that source rather than which lookup groups better. Only 2 pairs were held back from it, too few to settle the question. We have since measured it against records we can check ourselves.

How the three approaches to songwriter lookup differ, and how this comparison was run.

What an answer is

It answers identity. Which registrations belong to one human being — the step before the money question, and the one that has to be right first.
It is evidence, and it shows its working. Every join comes with the shared works, co-writers and publishers it rests on, for you to check against what you already know.
Read the evidence on a stage name. A stage name that reads like a legal name is the case worth a second look: the catalog behind the answer is what tells a right one from a near miss.

Many of those records carry an IPI name number, the identifier a society gives a writer’s name rather than to the writer: one person often holds more than one, and about six in ten songwriter records carry none at all. Look up a writer’s IPI name numbers by name.

When several people write under one name, a song settles which one you mean: tell songwriters with the same name apart with one song.

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.

Try it now Beta

Look up any writer by name, against the live data. Free, and nothing to sign up for.

Looking after several writers? Keep them on a free roster and see which have works under another spelling or number.

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.