About Musicianle
A daily puzzle built on the observation that a career has a shape, and that the shape is often enough to name the person.
The idea
Strip a musician's discography down to years, release types, and genre tags, mask the titles, and a surprising amount survives. A debut in 1967 followed by a decade of folk and a late turn into art pop is not a generic pattern. It belongs to somebody. Musicianle is that observation turned into a daily game.
Where the data comes from
Release data comes from MusicBrainz, a community-run music encyclopedia whose core data is published under CC0. Musician and release credits and dates originate there.
Genres come from Wikidata instead, which is also CC0. MusicBrainz publishes its genre vocabulary under CC0 but licenses the genre tags themselves, meaning the link between a specific record and a specific genre, under a NonCommercial licence. This site carries ads, so that link had to come from somewhere unrestricted. Wikidata covers fewer releases, so where it has no genre for a record we show the musician's own genre instead.
Deciding whether a musician is fair game needs a different signal, and we use Wikipedia readership for it. An early version ranked musicians by how many language editions of Wikipedia had written about them, which turned out to measure something quite different: contest entrants reliably get articles in twenty languages while remaining unknown to most listeners. Actual readership is a much better proxy for whether a player could plausibly know somebody.
How a puzzle is chosen
Candidates are filtered before they are ever scheduled. A musician needs at least six studio releases, a career spanning several years, and a real readership. Compilations and live albums are excluded because their titles carry no signal. Classical performers are excluded because their catalogues are largely recordings of other people's compositions, which breaks the premise of the game.
What survives is scored for difficulty and scheduled on a rotation that mixes easy and hard days deliberately. A run of equally hard boards reads as broken, and a run of easy ones stops being interesting.
Why there is no audio
Partly because the deductive version is a better puzzle, and partly because it is durable. A game that streams commercial recordings depends on rights it probably does not have. Musicianle uses open metadata and nothing else, so there is no catalogue deal holding it up.
The name, and the one underneath it
Musicianle follows the obvious pattern. Wordle made the format, Actorle applied it to actors, and this is the one for musicians. There is not much more to it than that, and a name people can guess the meaning of is worth more than a clever one.
The project's codename is different. In the repository, in the compiled binary and in the environment variables, this game is called Shanty. A shanty is a work song: something sung by people doing a job together, which felt right for a thing built in evenings.
The real reason is smaller and more personal. The game is named after my wife, Natasha Amy, and her name contains every letter of "shanty". It is not an anagram, just a hidden one, which is a fitting origin for a game about finding something that was in front of you the whole time.
The codename stayed because renaming a binary, a package and a set of environment variables costs real risk and buys nothing a player would ever notice. So the rule is simply this: anything you read says Musicianle, and anything a machine reads still says Shanty.
Attribution
Musicianle is built by NJLIGames.
It is not affiliated with or endorsed by MusicBrainz, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Wikidata, or any musician or label mentioned in a puzzle. All release data is factual metadata used under CC0.
Contact
Anything at all, including questions about the privacy policy, corrections to a puzzle, or a bug: info@njligames.com.