The public catalog file behind dajai.io lists 16,647 entries and 9,753,944 plays. Only 406 of those entries, 2.44 percent, carry a producer credit written into the title. Those 406 records hold 2,358,782 plays, or 24.2 percent of everything the catalog has collected. This piece measures who is on the beat, how concentrated the credited side really is, what the self-produced records show, and why a credit typed into a title is not yet a credit any database can read. The short answer: collaboration is where the biggest records came from, and the paperwork has not caught up.
Why Count Credits at All
For most of the last decade the only credits field I fully controlled was the title. On SoundCloud, the convention was simple: put the producer in parentheses, "(Prod. Name)," and the credit travels with the file wherever it gets reposted. That habit is all over this catalog. It is also the only place many of these credits exist.
That matters more now than it did when the uploads went up. Streaming services, collecting societies and metadata databases do not read parentheses. They read structured fields: an ISRC for the recording, an ISWC for the composition, and contributor roles attached to each. A catalog can have a long history of real collaboration and still look, to a machine, like one person working alone. So the question for this audit is not only who made the records. It is how much of that history is visible to anyone other than a fan reading titles.
Data and Method
The dataset is the catalog file served publicly at dajai.io/catalog.json, pulled on November 6, 2026. Each entry is one upload or listing, with play counts by source; I summed those counts per entry.
A credit means the title contains a parenthetical beginning with "Prod." or "produced by," matched without regard to capitalization. Producer names were normalized by lowercasing and stripping punctuation, so "BapeBrazy" and "bapebrazy" count as one. Co-credits count for every producer named, which means producer totals overlap and add up to more than the credited total. Self-produced records are the ones credited to Daj' or DAJ. For comparisons between credited and uncredited records I used only entries with at least one play, since thousands of entries are unplayed archive copies.
Finding 1: 2.44 Percent of Entries, 24.2 Percent of Plays
The 406 credited entries are a small slice of the catalog and a large slice of the listening. Among entries with at least one play, 343 are credited and 6,080 are not. The medians are close, 155 plays for credited records and 142 for uncredited ones, so a credit does not make a typical record bigger.
The difference is in the tail. Of the played credited records, 47, or 13.7 percent, cleared 1,000 plays. Of the played uncredited records, 334, or 5.5 percent, did. A credited record was about two and a half times as likely to break past four figures. That is a correlation, not proof that credits cause plays. Records that got a named producer were often records that got more attention at every step, from the beat to the rollout.
Finding 2: Six Records Carry the Credited Side
The credited side is even more concentrated than the catalog as a whole. Six records hold 2,184,209 plays, which is 92.6 percent of all credited plays and 22.4 percent of the entire catalog:
| Record (as titled) | Producer credit | Plays | |---|---|---| | Fetty Wap | BapeBrazy | 550,311 | | Inflation | BZUCRAZY and NOLIMITAUSTIN | 349,562 | | Big Sad 1900 x Daj' x Tizzy - Give Me Chip | NoLimitAustin | 341,096 | | PLAYER (ft. HG) | Lusif, Reesey Muney and NoLimitAustin | 336,320 | | Say My Grace | Daj' | 336,079 | | Alpaca | KayGW | 270,841 |
Five of the six involve an outside producer, and three of the six involve NoLimitAustin. The one self-produced record on the list, Say My Grace, is also the clearest sign that the artist can make the beat and the record at the same level.
Finding 3: The Producer Ledger
Normalizing names and splitting co-credits turns up roughly 50 distinct producer names across the 406 credited entries. A handful account for nearly all of the plays.
| Producer | Credited entries | Plays across those entries | Median plays (played entries) | |---|---|---|---| | NoLimitAustin | 115 | 1,110,555 | 196.5 | | BapeBrazy | 76 | 580,918 | 161 | | Daj' (self-produced) | 45 | 358,047 | 147 | | Reesey Muney | 23 | 338,541 | 163.5 | | Lusif | 12 | 338,509 | 197 | | KayGW | 1 | 270,841 | 270,841 | | CLOAK | 79 | 18,051 | 138.5 |
Three patterns stand out. NoLimitAustin is both the most-credited collaborator and the one attached to the most listening, more than a million plays across 115 entries. CLOAK is the opposite profile: 79 credited entries, nearly as many as BapeBrazy, but 18,051 plays in total and no single entry above 2,655. That is volume without a breakout, which is common and not a judgment on the beats. And the self-produced shelf is real: 45 entries, 358,047 plays, with a median in line with the outside producers.
Finding 4: A Credit in a Title Is Not Metadata
Here is the uncomfortable part. The catalog file carries 0 ISRCs. Every one of the 406 credits above lives in a title string, not in a contributor field. On the publishing side, The Mechanical Licensing Collective lists 47 works registered under DANIEL DAJAI STEWART-HANDY, all at 100 percent total known shares, and 19 of those 47 still have no ISWC. The MLC covers compositions and their writers. A producer appears there only if he is registered as a co-writer, and none of the title credits above prove or disprove that.
The practical effect is that the strongest records in the catalog, the collaborative ones, are also the ones whose credits are least machine-readable. Standards exist for exactly this. The DDEX Recording Information Notification format is built to carry contributor roles from the studio into the supply chain, and MusicBrainz documents how to attach producer relationships to a recording so they can be searched. Neither does anything for a credit that only exists in parentheses.
Limitations
The catalog file has known defects. Some songs appear as several entries; Inflation, for example, shows up under more than one title variant with different credit spellings, so a few producer totals include duplicates. The release_date field reflects ingest dates more than real release dates, so this piece makes no claims about timing. A record with a real producer but no credit in its title is counted as uncredited here, which means the 406 figure is a floor, not a full count. Play counts are platform-reported and the file mixes sources. Finally, everything here is correlational: credited records might do better because of the producer, the rollout, the feature artist, or all three.
What This Means
Collaboration is where the biggest records in this catalog came from. Six credited records hold more than a fifth of all plays, and outside producers are on five of them. That is the story the data tells, and it is a good one for the people who made those beats.
The work that follows is not glamorous. Every credited record that matters should carry an ISRC, a structured producer credit and, where a producer co-wrote the composition, a registration that names him. The 19 registered works with no ISWC are the first queue. The six records in the table are the second. A credit that lives only in a title is documentation for fans. A credit in the metadata is documentation for everyone, including the people who pay royalties.
Sources
- Daj' public catalog file, https://dajai.io/catalog.json, pulled November 6, 2026 (16,647 entries, 9,753,944 plays).
- The Mechanical Licensing Collective, public work search, https://portal.themlc.com, writer DANIEL DAJAI STEWART-HANDY.
- Donald S. Passman, "All You Need to Know About the Music Business," 11th edition, Simon and Schuster, 2023.
- DDEX, "Recording Information Notification (RIN) standard," Digital Data Exchange, https://ddex.net
- MusicBrainz, "Style Guidelines: Relationships," https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style