March 1, 2010
MusicBrainz
This a two part MusicBrainz tutorial in two posts… the why first.
What is MusicBrainz? It is a user-maintained open community that collects, and makes available to the public, music metadata in the form of a relational database.
Let me explain what a relational database is: A relational database matches data by using common characteristics found within the data set. The resulting groups of data are organized and are much easier for people to understand. For example, a data set containing all the music-releases in the world can be grouped by the artist, the year the recording was made; or it can be grouped by the label; or it can be grouped by the album title; and so on.
If you are like most people, you’ve already said; Boring. Or, Wth? What, does that mean to me? They got mp3s?
Yes, it is boring and no they don’t have any music, just in the form of music metadata. MusicBrainz provides data about recordings, not the music itself. If, your music metadata isn’t there it should be and this is the reason you should take control of your own music metadata. Let, the informational train continue:
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 additionally store information about the release date and country, the CD disc ID, an acoustic fingerprint for each track and have an optional free-form text field or annotation attached to them. As of 2 February 2010, MusicBrainz contained information about 517,993 artists, 772,130 releases, and 8.9 million tracks.
MetaBrainz Customers
The following companies have licensed our data for their own operations. This list does not include any individuals or companies that are using our Public Domain/Creative Commons data snapshots — there are many users of this data beyond the licensees listed here:
Last.fm is a social music site that combines the power of social networking with the power of music to provide first class music recommendations. With Last.fm you can create your own music profile and listen to personalized radio stations that play your music recommendations. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m ($280m USD).
Amazon.com uses MusicBrainz data to power their music site SoundUnwound, which allows the Internet community to edit music information in a friendly Wiki-like manner.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) uses MusicBrainz data to provide detailed information about the artists who get played on their radio networks. The BBC also has a team of editors who are participating in editing the MusicBrainz data for use with their internal systems and the /music web pages.
Cloudspeakers — Cloudspeakers aims to the major hub for music fans and professionals alike, linking to all reviews on the major music sites, and to all official (legal!) audio and video files on websites. You can ‘subscribe’ to your favorite artists and bands, and rely on the opinion of reviewers you trust to find new bands.
Flatster — Flatster is a music search engine/music playerthat serves the German market.
Grooveshark is a peer-to-peer digital music brokerage and social community that rewards users for sharing their music. Grooveshark uses MusicBrainz data to fuel its music discovery system.
MetaWeb — MetaWeb operates FreeBase the open, shared database of the world’s knowledge. MetaWeb uses the MusicBrainz live data-feed to add music metadata to FreeBase.
MusicIP is MusicBrainz’ primary partner that licenses its music recommendation and identification technology. MusicBrainz uses the MusicIP identification service MusicDNS as part of its Picard Tagger. MusicIP also offers its Mixer application to end users to experience the power of MusicIP’s automatic playlist generation tools.
Radio Tuna — Radio Tuna is a real-time search engine and player for online radio. Powered by MusicBrainz data, it tracks the music played on over 20,000 internet radio stations around the world, enabling them to be searched by artist or genre.
Spotify — Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! Spotify is brought to you by music lovers like everyone else.
Music Media Search — MusicMediaSearch aims to to collect every kind of information about the music world (artists, discographies, videos, news, …) and create a music social network where users can search, talk, discover their affinities and share their opinions about singers and groups.
Up To 11 — Up To 11 is a music recommendation site that uses the MusicBrainz data as one of its data sources.
That list, if you missed it – are MusicBrainz Customers. This community generated music metadata is important to you the artist (especially if you are not a English speaking artist, without western releases), because this information is about you, your work and is public knowledge. Used by sites aggregating the data; to define your existence, the spelling of your name, your homepage, your discography (track lists), your label (lack of label), your youtube, myspace and facebook pages, mp3 store, etc, etc, etc. Don’t rely on fans to get it right, or wait for your promoter/label (yeah, they know about it) to assign someone to your Musicbrainz entries. Roll up your sleeves and dive in – your music metadata can be your friend.
In two weeks: Musicbrainz… How?
Cheers
~D
