What is a MusicBrainz ID, and how Stick matches your tracks
Your listening history, as exported from the services, is just strings. "Fleetwood Mac, Dreams" from Spotify, "Fleetwood Mac, Dreams - 2004 Remaster" from Apple Music, "fleetwood mac, dreams" from an old scrobbler. Three spellings, one song. Count by text and you get three entries in your top tracks, each with a third of the plays. Every listening-stats service faces this; most just live with it.
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz is a community-maintained, openly-licensed database of music metadata, think Wikipedia, but for discographies. It has been running since 2000 and catalogues artists, releases and recordings in meticulous detail. Its key idea is the MusicBrainz Identifier (MBID): a permanent unique ID for every entity. An artist has one, an album has one, and, most importantly for listening stats, every distinct recording has one, so a live version and a studio version of the same song stay properly distinct while spelling variants of the same recording collapse together.
How Stick matches your plays
After every import, a background worker looks up each unmatched track against MusicBrainz and settles on the right recording, no manual tagging required. Confident matches are applied automatically; anything genuinely uncertain is set aside for a quick human decision rather than guessed at, see fixing unmatched tracks. Results are cached and shared, so a song anyone on Stick has already matched resolves instantly for you.
What the MBID buys you
- Honest counts. All spellings of a recording pool into one line in your top tracks.
- Cross-service de-duplication. Two services' differently-spelled records of the same listen can be compared by identity, the backbone of the duplicate scanner.
- Album art. With a release identified, its cover comes from the Cover Art Archive, MusicBrainz's companion image library, without you uploading anything.
- Genres. MusicBrainz's community genre tags power the genre breakdown in your stats, computed from what you actually played, not from a service's marketing categories.
Seeing it in your library
You don't have to take any of this on faith. The MusicBrainz page in Stick shows the running totals, matched, pending, needing attention, and every track's detail view shows which recording it matched, how, and with what confidence. If a match is wrong, you can correct it in place: pick from candidates, or paste an MBID straight from musicbrainz.org. And if you find yourself fixing a song MusicBrainz simply doesn't know yet, consider adding it to MusicBrainz , it's an open database, and your edit fixes it for everyone.