SecondHandSongs (or Second Hand Songs) is a collaborative website that maintains a global
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
of mainly
cover version
In popular music, a cover version, cover song, remake, revival, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording by a musician other than the original performer or composer of the song. Originally, it referred to a version of a song release ...
s of original works. It also contains information about
adaptations
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the ...
and
samples. The website allows performers and curators to add songs and update their
metadata. It includes links to freely accessible recordings of the covers, and external identifiers for those works and performances in other databases.
As of 2021, it included roughly a million covers of 100,000 original works, and was cross-referenced by
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for so ...
.
Data and uses
Data are contributed and edited by the active community, so the exact size of the database has changed over time. In 2007, the project included 60,000 covers. As of 2020, it had reached a million covers.
Data schema and identifiers
SecondHandSongs includes a work ID for each work, and a performance ID for each cover of a song by a performer.
A work is an
equivalence class of performances of the same underlying song. Each performer has at most one performance of a work in the database.
Derived datasets
In 2011, the Million Song Dataset project released a SecondHandSongs subset (an intersection of SHS and MSD data). At the time, this was the largest dataset of cover songs available for academic research.
Later, it released the ''SHS100k'' dataset for machine learning, with 100k covers of 10k works. This has since become a benchmark for cover-song identification.
See also
*
WhoSampled
WhoSampled is a website and app database of information about sampled music or sample-based music, cover songs and remixes.
History
Nadav Poraz founded the site in London, England in 2008, as a way to track musical samples and cover songs. ...
, a similar website that also contains information about cover songs (as well as
remixes), but is based more on
samples and
interpolations
References
{{Reflist
External links
* Search interface for th
SHS databaseUnder the covers
Internet properties established in 2003
Online music and lyrics databases
Cover versions