SongSuey · Music Credit Database

About SongSuey

We track who actually wrote every song on every major album.

The Person Behind It

Who builds this

Adam Culpepper

Developer & music researcher

I built SongSuey because I kept asking "does this artist actually write their own songs?" and kept getting scattered, hard-to-find answers. Wikipedia has the data buried in individual album articles. Streaming apps don't show credits at all. I wanted one place that answered the question properly, for every album and every track.

The Mission

Why we exist

The data is out there. It's on physical liner notes, registered with ASCAP and BMI, and transcribed on Wikipedia. But almost nothing pulls it together in one place.

SongSuey does that. For every studio album: who wrote the lyrics, who composed the music, who produced it, and who performed on it. Then we roll that up into a single authorship score per artist so you can answer the question at a glance.

Data Model

What we track

For every track on every studio album, we record four credit types:

Lyricist

Wrote the words. For hip-hop this is typically the rapper; for pop this may differ from the performer.

Composer

Wrote the music or melody. For produced genres this is often the producer or a separate songwriting team.

Producer

Handled the studio production and beat construction. Tracked separately and included in album metadata.

Performer

Featured artists and additional vocalists who appear on the track but may not hold writing credits.

Scoring

How authorship scores work

The authorship score is the percentage of tracks where at least one current or former band member holds a lyricist or composer credit. Production credits are tracked but don't affect the score. We measure songwriting, not production.

96-100% Complete Artist: writes virtually everything
81-95% Artist: mostly self-written
61-80% Songwriter: more than half self-written
41-60% Collaborator: heavy outside co-writing
21-40% Co-Performer: mostly performs others' material
0-20% Singer / Performer: rarely writes their own music

Sources

Where the data comes from

All credits come from public records, checked against primary sources where possible.

Wikipedia: our primary source. Album articles pull liner note data from physical releases, maintained by Wikipedia's music editors.
MusicBrainz: open music database with relationship data tying tracks to composers, lyricists, and producers.
AllMusic: supplemental credits and album metadata, especially for older releases with sparse Wikipedia coverage.
ASCAP / BMI: US songwriter registries, used to verify credits when other sources conflict.
Official liner notes: final authority when sources disagree. When we have the actual liner notes, they take precedence.

Albums we've double-checked are marked verified. Unverified albums may have incomplete credits, noted per album.

Colophon

Album artwork & technology

Album cover images are provided by the Cover Art Archive, a joint project of MusicBrainz and the Internet Archive. Cover artwork remains the property of its respective copyright holders and is shown for identification alongside the credit analysis on each album page.

SongSuey is built with:

Eleventy (11ty) with Nunjucks templates: a static site, no database or server-side rendering.
Font Awesome icons and the Roboto and Roboto Mono typefaces, all self-hosted.
sharp and resvg generate the social share images at build time.
Each album cover shows an instant placeholder using Lean Rada's CSS-only LQIP technique. The cover is encoded into a single number and rendered as a pure-CSS preview, with no extra request, while the full image loads.
Built and deployed through GitHub Actions.

Accuracy

Found an error?

The database is hand-researched and updated continuously. If you spot a credit that's wrong, missing, or attributed to the wrong person, we want to fix it.

Report a data error

Include the artist name, album title, track name or number, and what's incorrect or missing. We review every submission.