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:

  • Track: the main entity to which data is associated
  • Artist: associated with the track
  • Album: the album to which the track belongs

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.

​
Music Genre

The music genere of the song.
Can be used to group songs by genre, as input for similarity algorithms, artist genre identification, navigate songs by genere, etc.

​
Song titles translations

The track title, as translated in different languages, 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 IDs:

  • 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.

​
Example response from the API

{
    "message": {
        "header": {
            "status_code": 200,
            "execute_time": 0.0074818134307861
        },
        "body": {
            "lyrics": {
                "lyrics_id": 28690433,
                "can_edit": 0,
                "check_validation_overridable": 0,
                "locked": 0,
                "published_status": 1,
                "action_requested": "",
                "verified": 0,
                "restricted": 0,
                "instrumental": 0,
                "explicit": 0,
                "lyrics_body": "I know that we are young\nAnd I know that you may love me\nBut I just can't be with you like this anymore\nAlejandro\n\nShe's got both hands in her pocket\nAnd she won't look at you, won't look at you\nShe hides true love en su bolsillo\nShe's got a halo around her finger, around you\n\nYou know that I love you, boy\nHot like Mexico, rejoice\nAt this point, I've gotta choose\nNothing to lose\n\nDon't call my name, don't call my name, Alejandro\nI'm not your babe, I'm not your babe, Fernando\nDon't wanna kiss, don't wanna touch\nJust smoke my cigarette and hush\nDon't call my name, don't call my name, Roberto\nAlejandro, Alejandro\nAle-Alejandro, Ale-Alejandro\nAlejandro, Alejandro\nAle-Alejandro, Ale-Alejandro\n\nStop, please, just let me go\nAlejandro, just let me go\n\nShe's not broken, she's just a baby\nBut her boyfriend's like her dad, just like a dad\nAnd all those flames that burned before him\nNow he's gotta firefight, got cool the bad\n\nYou know that I love you, boy\nHot like Mexico, rejoice\nAt this point, I've gotta choose\nNothing to lose\n\nDon't call my name, don't call my name, Alejandro\nI'm not your babe, I'm not your babe, Fernando\nDon't wanna kiss, don't wanna touch\nJust smoke my cigarette and hush\nDon't call my name, don't call my name, Roberto\nAlejandro, Alejandro\nAle-Alejandro, Ale-Alejandro\nAlejandro, Alejandro\nAle-Alejandro, Ale-Alejandro\n\nDon't bother me, don't bother me, Alejandro\nDon't call my name, don't call my name, bye, Fernando\nI'm not your babe, I'm not your babe, Alejandro\nDon't wanna kiss, don't wanna touch, Fernando\n\nDon't call my name, don't call my name, Alejandro\nI'm not your babe, I'm not your babe, Fernando\nDon't wanna kiss, don't wanna touch\nJust smoke my cigarette and hush\nDon't call my name, don't call my name, Roberto\nAlejandro, Alejandro\nAle-Alejandro, Ale-Alejandro\nAlejandro, Alejandro\nAle-Alejandro, Ale-Alejandro\n\nDon't call my name (Alejandro, Alejandro), don't call my name, Alejandro\nI'm not your babe (Ale-Alejandro, Ale-Alejandro), I'm not your babe, Fernando\nDon't wanna kiss (Alejandro, Alejandro), don't wanna touch\nJust smoke my cigarette and hush\nDon't call my name (Ale-Alejandro, Ale-Alejandro), don't call my name, Roberto\nAlejandro",
                "lyrics_language": "en",
                "lyrics_language_description": "English",
                "script_tracking_url": "https://tracking.musixmatch.com/t1.0/m_js/e_0/sn_0/l_28690433/su_0/rs_0/tr_3vUCAKp6E34a0GeFzoL1oWwmyyEHIfAKX1G9c5gwfNE7tSDHSnuqOYbYFDwuLY3Urpti1oYm07jMdhg4H43kMewkbJzcWFU9C8d3g1LUckZ81_n-Yzkx_2pCc9X4icqx66m6sWFT85e38zs_rNVYswRvRizpVEdr0kLpMK38TtNFySqWKzVejmPNTl76jFsAgJ4zCamIr-piFZwpTqR9Zl_x2lYecKPK6GJIGzr7HbpACAvKcy5ZBVeIvG_Yg5Nz5NvGbaj6ubfh_AlYhX5WjSepOcjBy3a9OgMzwDdtbV5Cnip1sNHccmyKf06bPA61fMbeZ-XmzVWd9g8XNV5gLBcgwQkixG10lDQYJInWpaU2djo9oYB1xngIw2lDiAJf_Vof4tcqNc2YTduGWJW3FXV8gUPbIDofWINVq0uXwIiIeKPK_WETnp2SK90/",
                "pixel_tracking_url": "https://tracking.musixmatch.com/t1.0/m_img/e_0/sn_0/l_28690433/su_0/rs_0/tr_3vUCACCoayVfyz2YLuGKpHbeoZY_KsZV6VgVehlecLYj8-RwpMHRtOObvjaTgHatx6YVNqYwUPIKbBw5MAxKAhmkQC3bOh-4WBHTOAnvjizT3w7AE67TLcQyccRwaFfrrg08b15wt60ver36Y9fYoo5Jj1kmufe16xZuqsUo-tJ0VB8HPrT_nvy_Kzhk2g0BM9320QcZxtD_Y-21Gft-OSo9byz7AnsHEEo0MV32T0pqBOC7mHI-FYlcMg7qJ3AcNcranXq9d50cQ6wnTmfAKvzX0rdhaf71EwSgH_h-9TVphMKNrArpMUVcZcQH43jwvM4g3r1DNzKNeKNmdiBKqD-VtCYa7rcLpTyyLs1jTK_j8Y3OY1toeYraH7ybb9Mx8OF24qkuhbgVhpZFp2hO5TvrxcqIFZgGjOBGGfhwTbru11G-Jw14pkH5AMk/",
                "html_tracking_url": "https://tracking.musixmatch.com/t1.0/m_html/e_0/sn_0/l_28690433/su_0/rs_0/tr_3vUCANlt7izOgfr0oWZ5GqeRWnOeA2wEG0cZ-IIQTHHj_GdYOyVqbDnw2jwmOaR361H93DJgARQTT-WDQBi94NYynm0aCX0C32ae3yEm0yDcCbP16FlgctSkAxh8F52iU0JtvP019tPO12ba32SyVoDZyT0UzOkewtReoDOoWmmrpRk-vD0l7o1uYSUOs8mI421alb1PgM344BDqmJskddXaTsw1jEqwm9itPjga4GuWpqkdoRMdiS8pBmluBQyoGYW1tsevZS19krF9RS_okrHmCfelmEBkWeAazHkqlKD46qe-RkAJcliem-MTS9Mzna1urnw1ZF7_kwqIcIWo2FP01rHT5yNAEd2iLWRR5-KEDpmi8wRUNelyICnKnhYY9NTR9UGW6p64QzuVU9cJxOHsJQdBFitEyuZS8OQx0N0xDCZC8CPHPixOhBA/",
                "lyrics_copyright": "Lyrics powered by www.musixmatch.com",
                "writer_list": [],
                "publisher_list": [],
                "backlink_url": "https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Lady-Gaga/Alejandro?utm_source=application&utm_campaign=api&utm_medium=musiXmatch+-+internal+use%3A1409607281181",
                "updated_time": "2024-06-12T14:43:08Z"
            }
        }
    }
}

​
Artist

Inside the artist object you can get the following 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 Koreans 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.

​
Example response from the API

{
  "message": {
    "header": {
      "status_code": 200,
      "execute_time": 0.071532011032104
    },
    "body": {
      "artist": {
        "artist_id": 118,
        "artist_name": "Queen",
        "artist_country": "GB",
        "artist_alias_list": [
          {
            "artist_alias": "\u5973\u738b"
          }
        ],
        "artist_rating": 91,
        "artist_twitter_url": "",
        "updated_time": "2012-06-11T08:19:15Z"
      }
    }
  }
}

​
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.

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

​
Example response from the API

{
  "message": {
    "header": {
      "status_code": 200,
      "execute_time": 0.02262282371521
    },
    "body": {
      "album": {
        "album_id": 14250417,
        "album_name": "Party Rock",
        "album_rating": 100,
        "album_track_count": 16,
        "album_release_date": "2009-07-07",
        "album_release_type": "Album",
        "artist_id": 437407,
        "artist_name": "LMFAO",
        "primary_genres": {
          "music_genre_list": [
            {
              "music_genre": {
                "music_genre_id": 1132,
                "music_genre_parent_id": 14,
                "music_genre_name": "Britpop",
                "music_genre_name_extended": "Pop \/ Britpop"
              }
            },
            {
              "music_genre": {
                "music_genre_id": 7,
                "music_genre_parent_id": 34,
                "music_genre_name": "Electronic",
                "music_genre_name_extended": "Electronic"
              }
            }
          ]
        },
        "secondary_genres": {
          "music_genre_list": [
          ]
        },
        "album_pline": "2009 Interscope Records",
        "album_copyright": "2009 Interscope Records",
        "album_label": "Will I Am \/ A&M",
        "updated_time": "2013-09-26T16:06:25Z",

      }
    }
  }
}
Lyrics APIAPI methods