Coverage & sources

HH DB is built from open, machine-readable music data: release metadata, production and engineering credits, featured-artist relationships and region tags. Those sources are good, and they are not a complete record of hip hop. This page says exactly where the holes are, so nothing here reads as more authoritative than it is.

Two eras are missing entirely

These are not thin patches. They are structural absences: the music was released, and it was released in formats and on platforms that no open data source we ingest ever catalogued.

• The mixtape era, roughly 1995–2012. Tapes, CD-Rs, DatPiff and street releases carried an enormous share of the output of this period. Almost none of it was assigned a catalogue number, so almost none of it exists in an open release database.
• The SoundCloud era, 2014–2020. A generation released primarily to SoundCloud. Those uploads have no open, structured credit data at all — not the producer, not the engineer, not the features.

If you search an artist whose peak fell inside either window and the page looks thin, that is what you are seeing. Absence of a release or a credit here is not evidence it never existed.

Region coverage is 58.14%

Region is only known for 58.14% of the artists in the database (146981 of 252786; 105805 have none on file). Every region browse, every “artists from” count and every scene page is a view over that 58.14% — never over the whole roster. A region that looks small may simply be a region whose artists are mostly untagged.

Where an artist is filed is their origin where we have it — a birthplace for a person, a formation city for a group — and their current area otherwise. That is what lets a browse say Compton or Long Beach instead of United States.

A birthplace is not always the scene an artist came up in. Someone born in one city who built their career in another is filed under the first: the record says where they were born, and we do not guess at the rest. So a region here answers “where is this artist from, according to the source” — not “which scene claims them”, which is a judgement no open dataset makes.

We publish the figure rather than rounding it away, because a coverage number presented as a total is worse than no number at all.

What the connection graph actually proves

A connection path is a chain of documented collaborations — each hop is a release both artists appear on in the data. That makes a path we return strong evidence, and it makes “no path found” weak evidence: it may mean there is no link, or it may mean the link runs through a release we do not hold, most likely one from the two eras above.

Corrections

Found a wrong credit, a missing release or a bad region tag? Send it over — corrections against a named release are the fastest thing for us to verify.