Musixmatch API TrackSearch Function

Question

I'm trying to use the Musixmatch TrackSearch NPM function to get the unique TrackID which can then be used on the Track.lyrics endpoint. However, when I pass in certain song titles/artist, the result set doesn't include the correct matches, even if I broaden the search to include many results.

Please see my code below:

const music = require('musicmatch')({ apikey: "MY_API KEY" });

music.trackSearch({ q: "Drake - God's Plan", page: 1, page_size: 3 })
  .then(function (data) {
    console.log(data.message.body.track_list);

  }).catch(function (err) {
    console.log(err);
  })

This function returns two songs titled 'Empire' by Rick Ross & Drake and one Karaoke version of the song 'God's Plan' but nothing resembling the original version (which is currently #3 on the Billboard Hot 100). I find it hard to believe that 'God's Plan' does not exist in the Musixmatch database so I must be doing something wrong!

Answer 1

The root of your issue is that you're using the q search parameter. Per the docs, q is searching:

within track titles,artists,lyrics

so if your search is q: "drake" you're going to get back any results that include Drake in the Title, Artists, OR Lyrics which is more than what you're looking for.

There's a couple of things you can likely do to work around this but at a high level the simplest is probably to make use of the f_artist_id search property and use that to specify the artist_id (this may require you to have a separate function that finds the artist_id). EG:

music.trackSearch({ q: "Drake - God's Plan", f_artist_id: "<drake's artist id>" ...

The other option is to set your page_size really high and filter through the results, but that seems...cumbersome.

Answer 2

Slight continuing of drldcsta answer: the following curl command returns the 1 one song immediately:

---

curl --url "http://api.musixmatch.com/ws/1.1/track.search?q_artist=Drake&q_track=God%20Plan&apikey="

---

partial curl output: {"message":{"header":{"status_code":200,"execute_time":0.010561227798462,"available":1},"body":{"track_list":[{"track":{"track_id":153434470,"track_name":"God's Plan","track_name_translation_list":[],"track_rating":87,"commontrack_id":80272661,"instrumental":0,"explicit":1,"has_lyrics":1,"has_subtitles":1,"has_richsync":1,"num_favourite":7695,"album_id":29365716,"album_name":"Scorpion","artist_id":33491453,"artist_name":"Drake","track_share_url":"https://www

---

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I would avoid the 'q' input parameter if you can. 'q' will take longer to return data, the other 'q_' input parameters will be quicker and use less bandwidth.