---
title: "We give it to you real — Kapell"
description: "Song search, storefronts, real popularity, Apple's genres, and a lot more on the Artist page."
canonical: "https://kapell.fm/blog/2026-09-08-search/"
published: "2026-09-08"
---

Platform September 8, 2026

# We give it to you real

Flex a little skill, maybe pay a couple bills - Brother Ali

BY THE NUMBERS PLATFORM · LIVE

API SURFACE graph

SONGS SEARCHABLE 15.2M

POPULARITY COVERAGE 7% → 98%

STOREFRONTS 169

GENRES ~440

In many ways this version of the API is what I alway envisioned Kapell could be: A vast network of music I could lose myself in.

Today’s blog post is backed by [Gitit feat Slug and Brother Ali (on Kapell)](https://kapell.fm/l/album/am/1516936797?track=1516936799) from BK-One’s [Radio de Canibal (on Kapell)](https://kapell.fm/l/album/am/1516936797).

## Searching Songs

Search — which powers the retrieval of artists and albums when booping around in the client — now covers all 15.2 million Apple-resolved MusicBrainz recording and indexes the names *attached* to a track: the producer, the engineers, the players, and the studio. Searching for [Quincy Jones (on Kapell)](https://kapell.fm/l/artist/am/49436) finds the tracks he produced, not just the ones with his name in the title. The track actually *called* “Quincy Jones” still wins, because a hit on the track’s own title or artist is still best.

## Storefronts

Kapell was, until now, not really worried about the storefront your client was in (e.g. `us` &c) and was therefore prone to returning content you couldn’t play. 7.1% of the albums the API served pointed at an Apple id that doesn’t stream in `us`.

Every client call now includes a `storefront` argument, such that storefront-appropriate content is returned and popularity-ranked lists re-rank by *that* storefront’s score. Ask for the wrong id and you get `not_in_storefront` rather than a dead track.

## Popularity

Oh, I mentioned popularity above: Kapell’s API now has a proper, storefront-specific relevance score. Artist coverage went from 7.4% to 97.9%.

## Genres and Karaoke

Artist, album, and song now contain a genre. It’s based on Apple’s curated taxonomy, about 440 hierarchical nodes, so filtering on Dance matches Dance > House.

Two more helpful bits of data came along with this work: `explicit`, and `traits` (compilation, live, remix, karaoke), both filterable.

## Artists and More

The Artist API has now moved to GraphQL and it has more: Wikipedia prose and link-outs, ListenBrainz listen counts and similar artists, and more from Wikidata. Stuff like *active since*: MusicBrainz’s begin date for a person is their birth date, so “recording since 1969” wasn’t representable until now. Also birthplace with coordinates, formation place for groups, family, influences, associated acts, occupations, instruments, the labels an artist founded.

Albums and songs got full structured Wikipedia articles, sections in document order and the CC BY-SA attribution included.

## Small Things

- **ISRC collisions.** When two MusicBrainz recordings share an ISRC, the resolver now breaks the tie on the song’s own resolved album instead of picking the orphan. 316,283 songs resolve through the new tier; 11,382 of them landed on a different recording than before.
- **`appleIds` is ordered, best first.** A name-matched Apple id was sorting ahead of a UPC-exact twin whenever it happened to be numerically smaller, on 47,964 albums. Now `.first` means our best id.
- Various performance improvements, including efficiency improvements to the [materialization pipeline from July](https://kapell.fm/blog/2026-07-22-graphql) that cut down daily updates to minutes.

Kapell — for macOS

Press play. Meet the band.

A deeper way to play the Apple Music® library you already have — the credits, samples, and history, surfaced as the music plays. Buy it once, own the whole thing. No subscription.

[Download](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kapell/id6779394524) [See other journal entries](https://kapell.fm/blog)