Sections

API Methods

Music meta data

The musiXmatch api is built around lyrics, but there are many other data we provide through the api that can be used to improve every existent music service.

Let's explore the data we provide with some suggestion on how to use them for every single api object:

Track

Inside the track object you can get the following extra information:

  • Track Rating

    The track rating is a score 0-100 identifying how popular is a song in musixmatch.

    You can use this information to sort search results, like the most popular songs of an artist, of a music genre, of a lyrics language.

  • Instrumental and Explicit flags

    The instrumental flag identifies songs with music only, no lyrics.

    The explicit flag identifies songs with explicit lyrics or explicit title. We're able to identify explicit words and set the flag for the most common languages.

  • Favourites

    How many users have this song in their list of favourites.

    Can be used to sort tracks by num favourite to identify more popular tracks within a set.

  • Music Genre

    The music genere of the song.

    Can be used to group songs by genre, as input for similarity alghorithms, artist genre identification, navigate songs by genere, etc.

  • Song titles translations

    The track title, as translated in different lanauages, can be used to display the right writing for a given user, example:

    • LIES (Bigbang) becomes 在光化門 in chinese
    • HALLELUJAH (Bigbang) becomes ハレルヤ in japanese

  • Understanding Track Id's

    Every track has two distinct Id's

    • track_id: identifies a track within an album. The same song of the same artist may appear in a Single Album or Ep, then in the official Album, then in a "Live concert". All this tracks will have distinct Id's so you can build the Artist->Album->Tracks relation
    • commontrack_id: to link a track to its lyrics, syncs and music publishing information we group many track Id's into a single commontrack_id. Tracks with same commontrack_id will share the same lyrics.

Artist

Inside the artist object you can get the following nice extra information:

  • Comments and country

    An artist comment is a short snippet of text which can be mainly used for disambiguation.

    The artist country is the born country of the artist/group

    There are two perfect search result if you search by artist with the keyword "U2". Indeed there are two distinct music groups with this same name, one is the most known irish group of Bono Vox, the other is a less popular (world wide speaking) group from Japan.

    Here's how you can made use of the artist comment in your search result page:

    • U2 (Irish rock band)
    • U2 (あきやまうに)

    You can also show the artist country for even better disambiguation:

    • U2 (Irish rock band) from Ireland
    • U2 (あきやまうに) from Japan

  • Artist translations

    When you create a world wide music related service you have to take into consideration to display the artist name in the user's local language. These translation are also used as aliases to improve the search results.

    Let's use PSY for this example.

    Western people know him as PSY but korean want to see the original name 싸이.

    Using the name translations provided by our api you can show to every user the writing they expect to see.

    Furthermore, when you search for "psy gangnam style" or "싸이 gangnam style" with our search/match api you will still be able to find the song.

  • Artist rating

    The artist rating is a score 0-100 identifying how popular is an artist in musixmatch.

    You can use this information to build charts, for suggestions, to sort search results. In the example above about U2, we use the artist rating to show the irish band before the japanese one in our serp.

  • Artist music genre

    We provide one or more main artist genre, this information can be used to calculate similar artist, suggestions, or the filter a search by artist genre.

Album

Inside the album object you can get the following nice extra information:

  • Album Rating

    The album rating is a score 0-100 identifying how popular is an album in musixmatch.

    You can use this information to sort search results, like the most popular albums of an artist.

  • Album copyright and label

    For most of our albums we can provide extra information like for example:

    • Label: Universal-Island Records Ltd.
    • Copyright: (P) 2013 Rubyworks, under license to Columbia Records, a Division of Sony Music Entertainment.

  • Album type and release date

    The album official release date can be used to sort an artist's albums view starting by the most recent one.

    Album can also be filtered or grouped by type: Single, Album, Compilation, Remix, Live. This can help to build an artist page with a more organized structure.

  • Album music genre

    For most of the albums we provide two groups of music genres. Primary and secondary. This information can be used to help user navigate albums by genre.

    An example could be:

    • Primary genere: POP
    • Secondary genre: K-POP or Mandopop