Don't have to worry about me squashin' other deals
'Cause they've already been squooshed - Posdnuos, De La Soul
It’s amusing that Kapell’s docs say an empty field is almost never a bug yet I keep finding bugs. Sonder’s Lovely (on Kapell) samples a Brent Faiyaz (on Kapell) song also called Lovely (on Kapell), MusicBrainz knows it, and Kapell’s API happily returned the relationship, but with no Apple ID attached. Kapell routes on Apple IDs, so kachow empty-ass link. 🫠
This boiled down to a mistmatch in naming between MusicBrainz A.M. Paradox and Apple’s A.M. Paradox - EP. Not that EP suffix. Kapell’s API matches albums on an exact, normalized artist-plus-title key — deliberately exact because fuzzy matching can wrongly link Greatest Hits to the wrong Greatest Hits. Turns out this is not an edge case. Apple appends - EP or - Single to 55.2 million of its 65.9 million albums, and MusicBrainz carries none of them. Oopsie.
Stripping the suffix is the obvious fix and also not quite enough. Doing this yielded a lot of false-positives, so I changed tack and added the release type or the release year before we’ll call it a match. This yielded over 400,000 improved album matches and more than 700,000 new track matches.
Happy sampling!