Music royalties tech firm Notes.fm has launched Credits.fm, a “free and open music credits database” that aims to make attribution more accurate and, ultimately, help more artists get paid.
Designed to help the music industry organise, verify, and connect the data powering royalties and artist compensation in the age of AI, Credits.fm indexes more than 150 million song codes and credits across a growing network of music rights databases, collection societies, and registries.
Unlike traditional metadata databases, Notes.fm says Credits.fm is designed as an active infrastructure that can power royalty discovery, attribution, registration, and future payments systems. The platform is also designed to support both traditional search engines and new discovery systems built with emerging technology, with dedicated infrastructure optimized for LLM indexing and agent-based search.
Users can search credits across multiple domains including ISRC.fm, ISWC.fm and IPI.fm, while an open API + MCP functionality lets developers and companies using AI tools including Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT to integrate verified music credits directly into their workflows.
The launch arrives as the music industry grapples with a growing problem: more than US$1 billion in music royalties goes unclaimed every year, often because of incomplete or inconsistent metadata. With licensed AI training expected to create new revenue streams for rights holders in the years ahead, Notes.fm argues that accurate attribution will only become more critical.
“The music industry is entering a moment where attribution matters more than any other time in history,” says Tim Luckow, founder and CEO of Notes.fm and co-founder of Stem. “As AI systems become a bigger part of how music is discovered, created and monetized, 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.”
“Better credits lead to better outcomes for the creative professionals making the music. With Credits.fm, we’re helping solve a decades-old problem at a time when it’s primed to get exponentially worse.”
The company says its platform has already helped identify more than $10 million in previously unclaimed royalties over the past year, including work connected to artists such as James Blake, Zach Bryan, Mt. Joy, and more.
Learn more at Credits.fm.
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