Notes.fm launches Credits.fm, a free open database of 150M+ song credits for the AI era

Notes.fm launched Credits.fm on June 30, 2026, a free and open music credits database built to fix the data that decides who gets paid. The platform indexes more than 150 million song codes and credits, and ships an open API plus MCP so developers and AI tools can pull verified credits straight into their work.

What Credits.fm does

Credits.fm pulls credits and identifiers together from a growing network of rights databases, collection societies, and registries. It is searchable across separate domains, including ISRC.fm for recordings, ISWC.fm for works, and IPI.fm for songwriters and publishers, so each code has its own front door. The open API and MCP layer let developers and companies using Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT wire verified credits into their own tools.

Notes.fm describes Credits.fm as the “AWS layer” under its business, the infrastructure that powers attribution, while Notes itself acts as the financial layer helping musicians claim and manage royalties. Notes.fm was founded by Stem co-founder Tim Luckow.

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The music industry is entering a moment where attribution matters more than any other time in history.

Why metadata is the bottleneck

The money in music keeps getting stuck at the credits layer. When a credit is missing, wrong, or doesn’t connect across systems, the royalty sits unmatched, which is how funds pile up uncollected year after year. Credits.fm tries to close those gaps by linking every recording, work, songwriter, and release into one network and verifying each connection against independent sources.

AI makes the gap worse on two fronts at once. First, a flood of new tracks arrives with no clean rights data, the same flood behind the training-data databases The Atlantic published. Second, training royalties from licensed AI deals are a new revenue stream, and they only reach the right people if the attribution underneath is correct. A consent win on AI deals still routes no money if the plumbing stays broken.

What it means for artists

Notes.fm says it has already surfaced more than $10 million in unclaimed royalties in the past year, tied to work connected to artists like James Blake, Zach Bryan, and Mt. Joy. Clean credits are the difference between a song earning for the people who made it and a song earning for no one. The bet here is that an open, machine-readable credits layer becomes the place AI platforms, streaming services, and rights holders go to verify who is owed what.

Credits.fm is the first of a series of announcements Notes.fm says it has lined up, with more integrations and product upgrades due in the months ahead. The tools that already pay artists fairly show the demand; the infrastructure to route that money at scale is the part still being built.