Overview
What music information MusiMap can represent across your catalogue.
The Catalogue model describes the music information MusiMap can represent in your organisation's catalogues: artists, compositions, recordings, product editions, publication events, identifiers, classifications, and credits. Use these pages to understand what MusiMap supports when you ingest, manage, or read catalogue data through the API.
Your catalogue vs MusiMap Atlas
MusiMap distinguishes two layers of catalogue knowledge:
- Your workspace catalogue is private to your organisation. It contains the music information your organisation imports, creates, or manages: titles, credits, identifiers, classifications, and publication details from your sources.
- MusiMap Atlas is MusiMap's aggregated, validated knowledge catalogue. It is curated and managed by MusiMap and available according to your product access and API authorisation. See MusiMap Atlas.
Inventory and ingest APIs operate on your workspace catalogue by default. MusiMap Atlas reads require separate authorisation and are always read-only.
Entity mental model
The catalogue model separates compositions, recordings, and product editions. A concrete example using Queen's catalogue:
| Entity | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Work | Composition | “Bohemian Rhapsody” (the song as written) |
| Track | Recording | “Bohemian Rhapsody” as recorded by Queen |
| Release group | Editorial / product family | “A Night at the Opera” |
| Release | Concrete edition | “A Night at the Opera - 2011 Remaster - Deluxe Edition” |
| Release publication | Publication of that edition | UK / 2011-09-05 / label EMI |
| Artist | Creative party | Queen (group), Freddie Mercury (person) |
Why separate Work and Track? One composition can have many recordings (studio, live, remix). Credits and identifiers often differ between the composition and each recording.
Why separate Release and Release group? A product family (“A Night at the Opera”) groups all pressings and remasters. Each concrete edition (vinyl 1975, CD 2011 remaster) is its own release.
Why multiple release publications? The same edition may be published on different dates in different territories, by different labels, or as a reissue. Publication events describe when, where, and under which label an edition was published.
External references
MusiMap supports standard industry and provider identifiers as external references associated with the relevant catalogue entity. Examples include ISRC on tracks, ISWC on works, UPC and EAN on releases, and ISNI on artists. Provider-specific IDs from your sources can be represented the same way.
A release can also have one or more release publication events describing publication dates, territories, and issuing labels for a specific edition.
Entity reference pages
Artists
Creative parties, names, life events, credits, and classifications.
Works
Musical compositions independent of any particular recording.
Tracks
Recordings with duration, explicit status, ISRCs, and recording credits.
Releases
Product editions with type, nature, availability, and copyright lines.
Release groups
Editorial product families grouping related release editions.
Release publications
Territory-specific publication dates, labels, and publication kinds.
Classifications and vocabularies
Source and catalogue-owner classifications (genres, moods, campaign tags, internal categories) are represented as vocabulary assignments on entities. Your workspace can use global MusiMap vocabularies, create workspace-owned vocabularies, or extend global vocabularies with workspace-specific terms. These assignments preserve what your sources or catalogue owners asserted about the music.
Vocabulary assignments preserve classifications supplied by catalogue owners or source data. MusiMap Tagging (MusiTag) is separate analytical metadata produced by MusiMap from audio analysis. See the Tagging guide.