About
What Networked Players is — and isn't, yet.
An evidence-first music-credit graph and game. Given two artists or releases, it presents a documented route through credited work and explains each step.
The idea
Recorded music is a dense web of collaboration. The people who play, produce, engineer, arrange, and sing on a release leave a documented trail of credits. Networked Players treats those credits as a graph: two artists are connected when they are credited on the same release or track, and a path between two artists is a chain of those documented connections.
The point is the evidence. Every hop in a path keeps its proof attached — the release, the role text, the credit scope — so you can see exactly why two artists are linked.
Evidence, not influence
A shared credit proves documented participation. It does not prove that one artist influenced another, that they are friends, or that any artistic lineage exists. Networked Players deliberately refuses to make those inferences. Collaboration is a fact in the record; influence is a story we don't tell.
Where the project actually is
This is an early build, not a finished product, but the album grid and evidence-viewer experience now run on real, Discogs monthly-dump-derived data (snapshot 20260601) — 140 studio albums, 250 artists, 300 documented connections, drawn from a bounded working set seeded by a private collection that is never itself published. Album years are the master's original release year, not a reissue edition date, and the catalog fails closed against live albums, soundtracks, compilations, and other non-studio releases.
The flagship Connection Guesser game (below) now runs on the same real catalog: 300 one-hop and 200 two-hop rounds derived from those 140 studio albums and their documented credits — the synthetic universe survives only as an isolated test fixture, never played. Connection of the Day serves one frozen real round per local calendar day from a committed schedule. Record Routes is a third, distinct mode on the same catalog: guess how many documented-credit hops connect two records, and, for two-hop routes, who bridges them.
The connections demo on this site runs separately, on real Discogs data for a small, curated subset of releases and artist connections — fetched via the Discogs API ahead of the full CC0 dump pipeline (see the project's ADR 0012).
Data and rights
Publishable catalog facts derive from CC0 Discogs monthly data dumps, always carried with provenance: snapshot date, source URL, parser and schema versions, and the original role text.
Private collection membership is never published, and raw API responses stay on the coordination host. The demo dataset here is a small, curated subset of real Discogs releases — not a reconstruction of any private collection. Cover art is hotlinked directly from Discogs' own CDN, never downloaded or rehosted; marketplace and pricing data remain out of scope entirely.
What's next
Replacing the connections demo's API-sourced dataset with one derived from the CC0 monthly dumps (with full provenance and no collection membership); and, eventually, producer/engineer-bridge and six-degrees play modes. A future live-search mode is additive and must fail gracefully — the static-first core always works on its own. (Real cover art and Record Routes, both mentioned here previously, have since shipped.)