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The Publishing API has two halves: submit works into the catalog, and look up the rights and credits behind them. Submit. Rights holders and publishers send copyright and ownership information for musical works into the Musixmatch catalog — ownership and collection shares per territory, ISRCs, performers, alternate titles, and the validity lifecycle of works already ingested. This supports royalty collection workflows and keeps your works correctly matched across music sources. Look up. Two groups of methods, matching the sidebar:
  • Recording (recording.*). Administrators and credits for recordings, and the recordings of a musical work by ISWC.
  • Musical work (musicalwork.*). The full publishing behind recordings, and the works credited to a writer.
The data comes from CWR registration and from our reconciliation of it.

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Concepts

Reading the lookup responses is much easier with four distinctions.

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Sound recording vs musical work

A sound recording is a specific captured performance, identified by ISRC. A musical work is the composition it is a recording of, identified by ISWC. One recording can resolve to several musical works, and one musical work has many recordings. Every lookup method crosses between the two in one direction or the other.

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Ownership vs collection

Mechanical ownership share is a rights holder’s share of the work, on a 0–100 scale. It carries no territory: owning a share of a work means owning that share everywhere. Collection share is what is collectible in a specific territory, which diverges from ownership wherever a sub-publishing or administration deal puts collection in local hands. We hold it for controlled chains only, so the collection reported for a work in a country is the controlled part of it, never the whole work redistributed. A rights holder can carry a real ownership share and contribute no collection at all.

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Bands vs exact shares

Shares come back as band labels — 0-30, 30-70, 70-100 — in both mech_ownership_share and mech_share. The precise numbers are a separately priced add-on: set options.exact_ownership on musicalwork.recording.details.search.post and the same fields carry the figure instead. A key without that product gets a 403 for the option, not a silent downgrade.
A null share is not a zero: it means the data carries no share. A territory with nothing collectible is omitted from collection rather than reported as zero.

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Rights vs credits

administrator_list answers who controls the publishing. credit_list answers who made the recording — producers, engineers, players, composers, labels. They come from different pipelines and will disagree about the same recording. That is expected: they answer different questions, and we do not reconcile them.

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Response conventions

Every method answers over HTTP 200. The outcome of the call is message.header.status_code, and a request we cannot run carries a prose hint beside a machine-readable hint_code in the same header. Integrate against hint_code — the prose is free to change. An empty result is a coverage gap, never an error: an ISRC, ISWC or IPI we hold nothing for is a 200 with an empty list, not a 404. A failed read is a 500 and never an empty list, so the two can always be told apart. The batch methods take up to 25 recordings and answer one entry per submitted recording, in request order, so you can zip the response onto your request. Any bad input fails the whole request with a 400: there is no per-row invalid state. ISRCs and ISWCs are accepted hyphenated and in lower case. The paginated methods serve a fixed page size of 25. Sending page_size is a 400 rather than being ignored, so a short page always means the end of the results.