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 software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata (this is information about the performers, artists, songwriters, etc.) storehouse to become a structured online database for music.[3][4]
Type of site
Online music encyclopedia[1]
English
Robert Kaye
No
Optional (required for editing data)
Over 2 million registered accounts
July 17, 2000[2]
Online
Part Creative Commons Zero (open data) and part CC BY-NC-SA (not open); commercial licensing available
Perl with PostgreSQL database
MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and the length of each track. These entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata. As of October 2023, MusicBrainz contains information on roughly 2.2 million artists, 3.9 million releases, and 30.4 million recordings.[5] End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to add metadata tags to their digital media files, such as ALAC, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis or AAC.
Licensing[edit]
Since 2003,[13] MusicBrainz's core data (artists, recordings, releases, and so on) are in the public domain, and additional content, including moderation data (essentially every original content contributed by users and its elaborations), is placed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA-2.0 license.[14] The relational database management system is PostgreSQL. The server software is covered by the GNU General Public License.
The MusicBrainz client software library, libmusicbrainz, is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which allows use of the code by proprietary software products.
In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit group, by its creator Robert Kaye.[15] On 20 January 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was the Barcelona, Spain-based Linkara in their "Linkara Música" service.[16]
On 28 June 2007, BBC announced that it had licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music web pages. The BBC online music editors would also join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database.[17]
On 28 July 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.[18][19]
