SS-04Case study
A free music-credits site that scores every artist by how much of their catalog they actually wrote: 170+ artists, 1,700+ albums, 22,000+ tracks, every credit hand-verified against primary sources.
01Plates
Interface captures from the running site, with more frames reserved.
02The problem
Songwriting credits are public record, but try actually using them. The polished databases (Muso.AI, Jaxsta) keep track-level credits behind a paywall. The free ones stop at the album level, where twelve tracks of names blur into one liner note. And the crowd-sourced ones take whatever gets typed in, with no verification pass behind it.
So the simplest question a fan can ask goes unanswered: does this artist write their own songs?
SongSuey answers it with a number. Every artist gets an authorship score: the percentage of their studio catalog where the artist, or a member of the band, holds a lyricist or composer credit. It's computed per track from verified credits. Never estimated, never hand-waved.
03The data model
There's no database and no CMS. The whole catalog is flat files, one JSON file per artist. 170+ files, over a million lines between them. Every track carries a credits object with five role groups: lyricists, composers, producers, mixers, and performers, with performers carrying roles like "Lead Vocals." That flat-file, build-time architecture is the same frontend and JAMstack work I do for clients.
Albums carry their paper trail with them: a sources[] array of citations, a verified flag, and a lastVerified date. At the latest survey, 99% of albums are verified against primary sources.
{
"number": 1,
"title": "...",
"credits": {
"lyricists": [
{ "name": "Billie Eilish" },
{ "name": "Finneas O'Connell" }
],
"composers": [...],
"producers": [...],
"performers": [
{ "name": "Billie Eilish", "roles": ["Lead Vocals"] }
]
}
}04Build pipeline
The Eleventy config runs 1,214 lines and defines roughly 80 custom filters. Between them, they compute every piece of page content from the raw track credits at build time. Nothing is typed twice.
Track credits feed ~80 Eleventy filters produce Every score, chart & label
Six tiers, from Complete Artist down to Singer/Performer.
Sole-written, co-written, and outside-written splits.
Per-album charts tracing how authorship shifts across a career.
Output and authorship mapped decade by decade.
Career phases charted as ribbons along the timeline.
Who works with whom, plus top-collaborator lists.
Survey noteBecause everything derives from track data, a chart can never disagree with the credits underneath it.
05Guardrails
SongSuey publishes from CI, so the data has to hold its own line. Two layers of checks stand between an edit and the live site.
Preflight · blocking
validate:data runs before every buildIf any check fails, nothing deploys.
Postbuild · sweep
After Eleventy writes HTML, a second pass checks the output, not the input.
Survey noteThe validator comments read like a postmortem log: every rule exists because something once went wrong.
06Nice touches
The systems around the content: each one small, each one built so the site runs itself.
Scans prose and internally links any mention of a known artist, member, alias, or album. Longest match wins, it refuses to self-link, and everything is HTML-escaped on the way out.
Artists go live by publishDate, gated at build time, with a full editorial schedule dashboard for running the queue.
A weighted completeness score per album (FAQs weigh 3, insight 2), so editorial progress is measurable instead of a feeling.
Per-page Open Graph cards rendered at build time with resvg and bundled fonts. No screenshot service in the loop.
Performance badges generated in-house and served from the site itself.
Blurred low-quality placeholders generated with sharp, so album covers never pop in late.
Third-party image & badge services in production · 0
07Transmission
SongSuey is what happens when a frontend developer treats data integrity as part of the design. If your team, in Chicago or anywhere, runs a site that lives or dies on accuracy, I'd love to hear about it.