The music rights platform Notes.fm has launched Credits.fm, a free and open database that makes music credits easier to search and verify. Keep reading to find out more about the platform and how artists and rightsholders can benefit from using it.
Notes.fm Launches Free Music Credits Database
Notes.fm is a music rights platform that helps artists and rights holders identify and claim missing royalties by checking their music credits and rights information across multiple industry databases. With millions of releases and contributor entries spread across different rights systems, credit information is often fragmented and difficult to search in one place. To address this issue, the company has now launched Credits.fm, a free, searchable database that lets users look up tracking data and ownership records.
Notes.fm uses this same underlying data to help working musicians find unclaimed royalties through its main platform. Credits.fm publishes the underlying identifier graph for free so the wider music industry, including labels, publishers, distributors, journalists, and even AI assistants can build on top of it.
According to Notes.fm, more than $1 billion in music royalties goes unclaimed every year because credits are missing or incorrect. Tim Luckow, Founder and CEO of Notes.fm, explains: "The music industry is entering a moment where attribution matters more than any other time in history. As AI systems become a bigger part of how music is discovered, created and monetized, there needs to be a more reliable way to connect songs back to the actual humans creating them so they are able to get paid. Better credits lead to better outcomes for the creative professionals making the music. With Credits.fm, we’re helping solve a decades-old problem at a time when it’s primed to get exponentially worse."
The platform indexes more than 150 million song codes, recordings, compositions, and contributor records from music rights databases, collection societies, and registries. Users can search by code, song title, artist name, or paste a Spotify or Apple Music link to find ISRC recordings, ISWC musical works, IPI songwriter and publisher codes, ISNI creative contributor identifiers, UPC album releases, and musician profiles. Developers can access the same data through a free REST API and MCP server, the platform states on its website.
The platform gets its data from several major industry networks. Much of the songwriting credits and ownership data comes directly from the Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC). For linking recordings and tracking official codes, it relies on open databases like MusicBrainz, CISAC, and ISNI.org. The platform also includes direct navigation links to Apple Music and Spotify so users can easily listen to tracks and verify streaming IDs, though the actual music and artwork remain protected under the platforms' own developer terms.
How Independent Artists Can Benefit from the Database
For independent artists, Credits.fm is primarily a tool for checking whether their music data and credits are complete and consistent across different databases. While it is not a royalty collection platform itself, it can make it easier to identify missing or incorrect information that could affect attribution and, ultimately, royalty payments.
The database can also be useful for artists who collaborate frequently and for people who report on music. Producers, songwriters, session musicians, and publishers often contribute to the same release, and having those credits publicly searchable makes it easier to verify who worked on a recording and That can be valuable not only for royalty purposes, but also for building a professional portfolio and making future collaborations easier.
The music industry is becoming increasingly data-driven, and accurate credits are no longer just administrative details. They are becoming an important part of how music is identified, discovered, licensed, and monetized across both traditional streaming services and emerging AI-powered tools.
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