Solo dev shares hard lessons building a 90M-track music metadata API across six platforms
A solo developer built a music metadata API that cross-references over 90 million recordings from Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Beatport, Discogs, and MusicBrainz. The project's goal is to resolve any track identifier — including ISRCs, platform IDs, or artist-title strings — into a single canonical record. The developer found that ISRCs, the standard 12-character recording identifiers, could not serve as simple join keys because labels legitimately assign multiple ISRCs to variants like radio edits, remasters, and regional releases. This required redesigning the schema so that ISRCs live in a junction table linked to one canonical track, rather than a single column. The post details additional challenges including fuzzy artist-title matching and many-to-many relationships between recordings and compositions.
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