The music industry never did quite get its ‘global repertoire database’ off the ground, but the last decade has seen a number of individual (sometimes linked) efforts to gather music-metadata and make it useful for rightsholders, musicians and digital services alike.
The latest initiative comes from rights-tech firm Notes·fm with its new Credits·fm “free and open music credits database”, which launched this week.
The company says it has indexed more than 150m song codes and credits for launch, based on a network of rights databases, registries and collecting societies.
It’s also very 2026 in its use of MCP (Model Context Protocol) standards to help people to pull these credits into Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools. And AI is a key driver behind the creation of the database in the first place.
“As AI systems become a bigger part of how music is discovered, created and monetised, 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,” said Notes·fm boss Tim Luckow.
