There’s another company purporting to help you get credit where credit is due, but does it perform? That’s the question I hope to answer in this post.

As an independent artist, I thought Muso.AI was going to help me in some way to get recognition for my work. It turns out that for independent artists, you get almost nothing for your money.

From the Muso.AI website, their reason for being:

Muso.AI was founded in 2017 at NRG Recording Studios in Los Angeles after years of searching for a universal credit database that could keep up with the digitization of music.

Founders Jay Baumgardner (producer, engineer, mixer), Kyran de Keijzer (producer, engineer, artist), and Aaron Kaufman (musician, engineer), decided to build their own solution, geared toward helping behind-the-scenes musicians gain access and make verified updates to their credits.

Now, Muso.AI employs an international team of developers, designers, and specialists based around the world. We are currently headquartered in L.A. and Amsterdam.

So their reason for being to to get behind-the-scenes’ players the recognition they deserve. Not a priority for independent artists.

They emphasize this in another place on their website by saying

Missing Credits? You Are Not Alone.

Over 50 million songs streaming right now are missing the majority of songwriter, producer, engineer, musician, management, and other behind-the-scenes credits. We’re here to fix that.

Again, not a priority for independent artists.

As for analytics, they ain’t got much. They say

Now It's Your Turn

Turn Your Credits Into Daily Stats and Historical Trends. Track Streams, Playlists, Charts and more...

But for most artists, these daily stats and historical trends are not enlightening or accurate. I found all kinds of buggy data in the charts on Muso.AI, making analysis difficult to impossible to make any judgements. I don’t know where the data inconsistencies came from the streaming platforms or whether Muso’s data gathering is faulty, but glitches in the data weren’t comforting. Their sources of data aren’t all-encompassing either. My data only came from a couple of the big players, whereas I get significant plays from 8-10 streaming platforms. And one of those big platforms is Spotify. In fact, if you don’t place your music into Spotify’s database, you can’t get credit for any of your work because in order to get credit you must enter your work into Spotify’s database.

If I haven’t turned you off, there’s a question of money.

As you can see, you don’t get much for $10 a month. To get any meanful stats, you have to pay more money

For the average indie musician this is a little pricey. And I don’t know what this money really buys you.