Lexicon

An Artist Node is your permanent, registered presence in the mysetlist.ai registry. Think of it as a verified digital identity card for your music career — one that connects your name, your catalogue identifiers (ISNI, ISRC), and your distribution preferences in a single tamper-evident record.

Plain English: When you sign up, we create a record that says "this artist, with these platform preferences, is who they say they are." Every DSP or label that queries the API gets the same verified answer.

A unique identifier assigned to every registered artist in the format msl:artist:{slug}:{uuid}. For example: msl:artist:radiohead:550e8400-…. The slug is a human-readable version of your name. The UUID is a cryptographically random string that cannot be guessed.

Plain English: It's like a passport number for your artist identity on this platform. The readable part tells you whose it is; the random part is what proves it's yours and keeps it secure.

A defined way for one software system to talk to another. When a label's internal system queries GET /api/v1/artist/{uuid}, it is making an API call — asking our server for a specific artist's data in a structured format.

Plain English: Think of an API as a waiter in a restaurant. You (the label's system) tell the waiter what you want; the waiter brings back exactly that from the kitchen (our database), formatted in a predictable way every time.

The requirement to acknowledge the source of data or creative work when using it in a downstream product. Carriers using the mysetlist.ai API are required by the API Terms of Service to credit "mysetlist.ai Artist Node Registry" wherever that data is surfaced to end users or partners.

Plain English: If a label uses our data to power a tool they sell, they must say where the data came from — the same way a journalist cites a source.

A type of API credential where the holder of the token (the "bearer") is granted access — no username or password exchange needed. Carrier API keys issued by mysetlist.ai are bearer tokens passed in the HTTP Authorization header as Bearer ck_live_….

Plain English: Like a physical key card for a building. Anyone holding the card can get in — which is why you must keep it secret and never share it.

One of the three major US Performing Rights Organisations (PROs), alongside ASCAP and SESAC. BMI collects performance royalties on behalf of songwriters, composers, and music publishers when their works are broadcast on radio, TV, in venues, or streamed online. BMI then distributes those royalties to rights holders.

Plain English: When your song plays on the radio, BMI is the organisation that notices, collects the fee from the broadcaster, and sends you your share — but only if your work is registered with them and they can identify you correctly.

In mysetlist.ai terminology, a Carrier is any organisation — record label, distributor, PRO, broadcaster, sync house, or DSP — that accesses the Artist Node Registry via the API to look up or process artist metadata. Carriers apply for access and receive a unique API key.

Plain English: Artists register their identity on this platform. Carriers are the industry players — labels, Spotify, BMI, radio stations — who then look up that identity to make sure they have the right information before paying royalties or distributing music.

The complete body of recorded works associated with an artist, label, or publisher. In the context of mysetlist.ai, your catalogue refers to all the recordings and compositions whose rights are tied to your Artist Node.

Plain English: Your catalogue is simply your body of work — every song you've recorded, released, or own rights to. The more accurately it's registered, the more royalties flow back to the right person.

The international term for organisations that collect and distribute royalties collectively on behalf of rights holders. In the US these are called PROs (Performing Rights Organisations). Examples worldwide: PRS for Music (UK), SOCAN (Canada), APRA AMCOS (Australia), GEMA (Germany), SACEM (France).

Plain English: A CMO is a middleman between those who use music (broadcasters, venues, streaming platforms) and those who created it (artists, songwriters). They collect the fees and pass them on — but they need accurate identity data to know who to pay.

An industry standards body that defines XML-based message formats for communicating music metadata between DSPs, distributors, labels, and rights management organisations. When Spotify sends sales data to a label, or when a distributor delivers a release to Apple Music, they typically use DDEX-formatted messages.

Plain English: DDEX is a shared language that the music industry agreed on so that everyone — from a small indie distributor to a major streaming platform — can send and receive the same information without anything getting lost in translation.

ddex.net →

A W3C standard for persistent, self-sovereign digital identifiers that do not require a central authority to issue or validate. DIDs follow the format did:method:identifier. The mysetlist.ai Artist Node ID format (msl:artist:{slug}:{uuid}) follows DID naming conventions and is forward-compatible with a future registered DID method.

Plain English: Most online identities are controlled by a company — if Google deletes your account, your identity disappears. A DID is designed so that you own your identifier and no single company can revoke it.

A company that delivers an artist's music to streaming platforms and digital stores on the artist's behalf. Common distributors include DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, AWAL, and Amuse. The distributor handles the technical delivery (in DDEX format) and the financial settlement of streaming royalties back to the artist.

Plain English: Distributors are the logistics company between you and Spotify. They take your finished recordings, format them correctly, upload them to dozens of platforms simultaneously, and collect the money those platforms owe you.

The music industry term for any streaming or download platform — Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, SoundCloud, Beatport, and Bandcamp are all DSPs. They license music from rights holders (directly or via distributors), deliver it to listeners, and pay royalties based on usage data.

Plain English: DSPs are the shops. You don't buy a CD anymore — you stream from a DSP. The DSP pays the artist a small amount every time their song is played, but only if the artist's identity and banking details are correctly registered.

An ISO 27729 standard — a 16-digit number that uniquely identifies a public identity in the creative sector. ISNIs are assigned by accredited agencies and are used by libraries, CMOs, and streaming platforms to distinguish between people with the same name. Radiohead's ISNI is 0000000121707484.

Plain English: Imagine there are 47 musicians all named "John Smith." The ISNI is like a government-issued ID number that tells everyone exactly which John Smith wrote a specific song — so the right person gets paid.

isni.org →

An ISO 3901 standard — a 12-character alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies a specific recording. Each individual track version gets its own ISRC: the original, the remix, the acoustic version, and the live version all have different ISRCs. Format: CC-XXX-YY-NNNNN (country, registrant, year, sequence).

Plain English: The ISNI tells you who the artist is. The ISRC tells you which exact recording they made. Think of it as the barcode for a specific version of a song — DSPs and CMOs use it to track exactly how many times that precise recording was played.

isrc.ifpi.org →

Structured data that describes a piece of content. For a music recording, metadata includes: artist name, song title, album title, ISRC, ISNI, release date, genre, BPM, key, rights holder, splits, and distribution territory. Accurate metadata is the foundation of every royalty payment in the digital music ecosystem.

Plain English: The music file itself is the content. Metadata is the label on the package — who made it, what it is, who owns it, and who should be paid. When metadata is wrong or missing, royalties go unpaid or go to the wrong person. Billions of dollars in royalties are unclaimed each year due to bad metadata.

A passwordless authentication method where a single-use URL is sent to the user's verified email address. Clicking the link logs the user in without a password. The mysetlist.ai artist dashboard uses a variant of this: the UUID embedded in the link acts as the session credential.

Plain English: Instead of a username and password, you get a special one-time link sent to your email. Click it, and you're in — no password to forget or be hacked.

Short form of Artist Node ID. See Artist Node ID above.

The mysetlist.ai Pipeline is the five-stage process through which an artist's metadata travels from submission to verified carrier delivery: (1) Identity Capture, (2) Metadata Enrichment, (3) Standard Anchoring, (4) Carrier Routing, (5) Royalty Settlement. Each stage is designed to reduce the errors that cause royalty leakage.

Plain English: Think of it as an assembly line for your artist identity. Raw information goes in one end; a clean, verified, industry-standard record comes out the other — ready for any label, PRO, or streaming platform to consume without ambiguity.

An organisation that licenses music for public performance and distributes the resulting royalties to songwriters and publishers. US PROs include ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. The UK equivalent is PRS for Music. PROs collect from broadcasters, venues, restaurants, gyms — anywhere music plays publicly.

Plain English: Every time your song plays in a coffee shop, on the radio, or at a sporting event, someone owes you money. PROs are the organisations that collect that money and make sure it reaches you — but only if you've registered your works with them and your identity is verifiable.

A US Patent and Trademark Office filing that establishes a priority date for an invention without triggering the full examination process. It gives the applicant 12 months to file a non-provisional patent application. mysetlist.ai has two active provisional applications: No. 64/060,499 (filed May 8, 2026) and No. 64/074,013 (filed May 25, 2026).

Plain English: A provisional patent is like calling "dibs" on an invention with the government. It says "we thought of this first, on this date" and gives the inventors time to build it out before going through the full (expensive, lengthy) patent process.

A cap on how many API requests a client can make within a given time window. The mysetlist.ai API currently allows up to 1,000 requests per day per carrier key during beta. Exceeding this returns a 429 Too Many Requests response.

Plain English: A rate limit is like a speed limit for data requests — it prevents any one user from overloading the system and ensures fair access for everyone.

The mysetlist.ai Artist Node Registry is the structured database of all registered artist identities. It stores Artist Nodes — immutable records linking an artist's identity credentials to their distribution preferences and platform authorisations. The registry is the authoritative source queried by carriers via the API.

Plain English: The registry is the master list. Like a land registry records who owns which property, the artist registry records who controls which musical identity — and what they've authorised.

The current state of an Artist Node submission. Three possible values: pending — submitted and awaiting review; approved — identity verified and node is active in the registry; rejected — submission did not pass review (artist will be notified with a reason).

Plain English: After you submit, we check your information. Pending means we're looking at it. Approved means you're live. Rejected means something didn't check out — we'll tell you what.

Payments made to rights holders each time their intellectual property is used. In music, there are several types: mechanical royalties (paid when a song is reproduced — a stream or download), performance royalties (paid when a song is publicly performed or broadcast), and sync royalties (paid when a song is licensed for use in film, TV, or advertising).

Plain English: Every time your music is streamed, broadcast, or used commercially, someone owes you money. That money is a royalty. The reason so much of it goes uncollected is that the systems used to identify who to pay are fragmented, outdated, and error-prone. That is the exact problem mysetlist.ai is built to fix.

Royalties that are generated by music usage but never reach the artist or rights holder — typically because of missing, incorrect, or ambiguous metadata. Industry estimates suggest billions of dollars in music royalties go unmatched and unpaid each year. Leakage is most common when artist names are spelled differently across systems, ISRCs are missing, or ownership splits are not registered.

Plain English: Spotify knows a song was played 10 million times, but if the metadata doesn't clearly identify who owns it, they can't send the money anywhere. It just sits in a holding account — or gets distributed incorrectly. Stopping that leakage is the core purpose of this platform.

A version number embedded in each Artist Node record that indicates which data format specification was used to create it. The current schema is version 2. When the data structure changes in the future, the version number increments — allowing older records to be read correctly by systems that understand the versioning.

Plain English: Like file format versions (Word 2003 vs Word 2024), the schema version number tells a computer system exactly how to read a record. It prevents older data from being misinterpreted when the format evolves.

A synchronisation licence (sync) is granted when music is "synchronised" with moving images — used in a film, TV show, advertisement, video game, or online video. Sync fees are negotiated directly and can range from a few hundred dollars for a YouTube ad to millions for a major film. Sync houses and music supervisors are the gatekeepers of these opportunities.

Plain English: When a brand wants your song in their Super Bowl ad, they need a sync licence. It's one of the highest-paying ways music generates revenue — and accurate identity data is what gets you in the room.

A 128-bit identifier generated using cryptographically secure randomness, standardised in IETF RFC 4122. In version 4 (UUID v4), 122 bits are random — making the probability of collision (two identical UUIDs) astronomically small. Format: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx. The UUID is the private, unforgeable half of every Artist Node ID.

Plain English: A UUID is an ID so random that even if a billion people generated one at the same time, the chance of two matching would be effectively zero. That randomness is what makes it secure as a bearer credential — nobody can guess yours.