About Mathaka
මතක — ස්මරණය, සදාකාල
What is Mathaka?
Mathaka (මතක) means memory. It is a free, open, community-built archive of Sinhala music — the songs, the people who made them, and the history that shaped them.
Sri Lankan music has never really had a home online. Lyrics sit scattered across dead forums and video descriptions, usually with no credit and no source. Recordings outlive the names behind them. Mathaka gathers what survives into one place anyone can read, correct and build on.
Think of it as a Wikipedia for Sinhala music: anyone can read, and contributors keep it accurate and growing. Every article is written in both English and Sinhala, and every claim is traceable to a cited source. All data is released under the Open Database License (ODbL) — use it, share it, build on it, and share your improvements back.
What is inside
- The songs Lyrics for 10,501 songs, searchable in Sinhala or English — each one carrying the names of everyone who made it.
- The people Behind every song are a writer, a composer and a singer. Memory usually keeps only the last. Here you can trace all three, and everything each of them made.
- The history How a century of Sinhala song took the shape it has — the movements, the arguments, the institutions and the recordings behind the music.
Why the credits matter
A Sinhala song is rarely one person's work. Someone wrote the words. Someone set them to music. Someone sang them. Popular memory almost always keeps that last name and loses the first two.
Mathaka records all three roles against every song it can. A lyricist's work becomes visible as a body of work rather than a scattering of songs — and you can move from a song to the people who made it, and from a person to everything they touched.
Core values
Fully open
Everything is released under ODbL. No paywalls, no sign-up required to read a single word.
Accuracy first
Community editing with version history, and sources cited, so the archive gets more correct over time rather than less.
Preservation-minded
This music is cultural heritage. It is treated as a record worth keeping, not as content to be filled around.
Developer friendly
A free REST API, open data dumps, and a codebase anyone can self-host and build on.
The data
- Songs
- 10,501
- Artists
- 3,681
- License
- ODbL
- Cost to use
- Free forever
Build with the API
Mathaka offers a free, open REST API — no authentication, no keys. Built for apps, research projects, personal music tools and self-hosted libraries.
ශ්රී ලාංකික ගීතයේ රස වින්දනය සදාකාලයෙන් රැකගනිමු.
Let us preserve the beauty of Sri Lankan song for eternity.