Nvoko

Problem

Artists, producers, songwriters and managers needed to record who owns what in a release, invite collaborators, agree ownership splits, and generate and sign contracts from that data.

Constraints

• Contracts are generated from structured questionnaire answers, so every term in the document has to trace back to an answer.
• Catalogue data comes from music providers.
• Upload limits and the links between contracts, collaborators and releases had to be enforced on the server, not only in the interface.

What I owned

• Through my part-time contract with ArtistHub LLC, alongside Craft Crew: I took over a product started in 2020 and have been its only engineer since October 2023, across the Vue frontend and the Node/GraphQL backend.
• Catalogue, invitation, contract-preview and signing flows.
• Backend flows for registration, collaborator records and contract integrity, including server-side upload limits.
• The marketing site and the Discogs credits service.

Hardest problem

Matching recordings to their credits

Nvoko invites a song's writers and producers to its agreements, so it has to know who they are. I rebuilt the matcher that finds each Spotify recording among Discogs' 19.4 million releases, and measured it against 1,048 hand labels covering 312 recordings. On 107 recordings it had never been tuned on, all 60 it marked as verified were correct, and so were all 192 credits attached to them. The article covers it in detail.

Related article: Matching Spotify recordings to Discogs credits ↗