About Songlinks

What Songlinks does

One songwriter is usually registered many times: under a full name and a short one, with and without a middle initial, under more than one IPI name number, and sometimes with no number at all. Two different writers can share a name exactly. Songlinks reads all of those registrations and answers the question people actually have: which of these are this person?

The answer is a person: one page with every registration Songlinks joined to them, the works under those registrations, the songwriters they write with, and the records that might be them but were not joined. Look a writer up by name or by IPI name number; it is free and needs no account.

What a Songlinks person ID is

Each person gets an ID such as SLP-Z3T8-G114-P. It names one human being, not a registration, a band or a company. Once released, it keeps naming the same person when the registration data is reloaded; if two IDs turn out to be one person, one points to the other, so a saved link keeps working. A page marked “Prerelease ID” carries no such promise yet. The last character is a check character, so a mistyped ID is caught rather than misread.

How registrations are grouped into people

By the evidence around a name more than the name itself. Songlinks compares registrations in pairs and asks whether they are the same human being, weighing the identifiers they carry, the works they are registered on, and the songwriters and publishers they appear with. The name is the weakest part of that evidence: two people who share one and never share a song or a collaborator stay two people.

Three rules can be checked on any page:

• When the evidence does not settle it, Songlinks does not join. The record is shown apart, under “possibly the same person”, and its works are not counted.
• A registration with no IPI name number is never joined on a model’s score alone. Those are shown apart too, for the person who knows the writer to settle.
• Every join shows what it rests on: the shared works, co-writers and publishers, so an answer can be read rather than taken on trust.

A wrong join is worse than a missed one when money follows the answer, so Songlinks is built to say “not sure” rather than guess. More on the approach, in plain terms: what kind of machine learning this uses.

How we check our answers

Against references we did not make, and never by eye alone. Every change to how people are grouped is scored before it ships, on test sets fixed in advance and on more than one random draw, and judged on all of its measures together rather than the one it improves. We also measure Songlinks against the leading public lookup on questions decided in advance: the head-to-head, with where we are behind.

The data

Songlinks reads public music rights-registration data as a snapshot and reloads it from newer snapshots. It shows what is registered, as registered: it does not add works, change names or invent numbers. Where a registration carries a code, such as an ISWC, the page shows it; we do not publish which data it is.

What an answer is not

Not a rights or royalty decision. Songlinks is in beta, and a grouping is a model’s judgement that no person has checked unless the page says so. Treat an answer as a lead to verify in the registrations themselves. Songlinks also does not say who owns what share of a song.

Corrections and privacy

A wrong grouping is exactly what we want to hear about: email alex@songlinks.to. We can change how records are grouped; we cannot change a registration itself, which belongs to whoever filed it. How we handle personal data is in the privacy notice.

Who runs Songlinks

Songlinks is run by Kane Technology Group, LLC. Looking a writer up is free. A free account keeps a roster of the writers you look after and a record of which registrations are theirs (what an account does), and we run checks over a whole roster or catalog as a service (for publishers).