MusicBrainz is a project by the MetaBrainz Foundation that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to thefreedb project. MusicBrainz was founded due to the restrictions placed on theCompact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audioCD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals beyond serving as a CDmetadata repository, evolving into a structured online database for music information, including details about artists, performers, and songwriters.[4][5]
MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture the album title, track titles, and the length of each track at a minimum. These entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can also store information about release date and country, the CD ID,cover art,acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata. As of May 2025[update], MusicBrainz contains information on over 2.6 million artists, 4.7 million releases, and 35.2 million recordings.[2] End-users can use software that communicates with MusicBrainz to addmetadata tags to their digital media files, such asALAC,FLAC,MP3,Ogg Vorbis orAAC.
MusicBrainz allows contributors to upload cover art images of releases to the database; these images are hosted by Cover Art Archive (CAA), a joint project betweenInternet Archive and MusicBrainz started in 2012. Internet Archive provides the bandwidth, storage, and legal protection for hosting the images, while MusicBrainz stores metadata and provides public access through the Web and via anAPI for third parties to use. As with other contributions, the MusicBrainz community is in charge of maintaining and reviewing the data.[6] Until May 16, 2022,[7] cover art was also provided for items on sale atAmazon and some other online resources, but CAA is now preferred, because it gives the community more control and flexibility for managing the images. As of May 2025[update], over six million images are stored in the archive.[8]
In June 2024, MusicBrainz launched the Event Art Archive, another joint venture with the Internet Archive.[9] The project is labeled as "the internet's greatest repository for event art", and as of May 2025[update], contains over 8,000 images.[8]
In addition to collecting metadata about music, MusicBrainz also allows users to match recordings by their acoustic fingerprint. A separate application, such as MusicBrainz Picard, is used to do this.
In 2000, MusicBrainz started usingRelatable's patented TRM (arecursive acronym for TRM Recognizes Music) for acoustic fingerprint matching. The popularity of this feature drew in a large user base to the platform, enabling the database to expand rapidly. By 2005, TRM was experiencing difficulties in handling the sheer volume of data, as the number of tracks stored in the database had surpassed one million. This issue was resolved in May 2006, when MusicBrainz partnered with MusicIP (nowAmpliFIND), replacing TRM with MusicDNS.[10] TRMs were phased out and replaced by MusicDNS in November 2008.
In October 2009, MusicIP was acquired byAmpliFIND.[11]
Since the future of the free identification service was uncertain, a replacement for it was sought. The Chromaprint acoustic fingerprinting algorithm, which serves as the basis for theAcoustID identification service, was started in February 2010 by long-time MusicBrainz contributor, Lukáš Lalinský.[12] While AcoustID and Chromaprint are not officially MusicBrainz projects, they are closely tied with each other and are both open source. Chromaprint works by analyzing the first two minutes of a track, detecting the strength for each of 12pitch classes, storing these eight times per second. Additional post-processing is then applied to compress the fingerprint while retaining patterns.[13] The AcoustID search server then searches from the database of fingerprints by similarity and returns the AcoustID identifier along with MusicBrainz recording identifiers, if known.
In December 2004, the MusicBrainz project was turned over to the MetaBrainz Foundation – anon-profit group based inSan Luis Obispo, California – by its creator Robert Kaye.[16] On January 20, 2006, the first commercial venture to use MusicBrainz data was theBarcelona, Spain-basedLinkara in their "Linkara Música" service.[17]
On June 28, 2007, theBBC announced that it had licensed MusicBrainz's live data feed to augment their music web pages.BBC online music editors would also join the MusicBrainz community to contribute their knowledge to the database.[18]
On July 28, 2008, the beta of the new BBC Music site was launched, which publishes a page for each MusicBrainz artist.[19][20]
Picard identifiesaudio files andcompact discs by comparing either theirmetadata or theiracoustic fingerprints with records in the database.[21] Audio file metadata (or "tags") are a means of storing information about a recording in the file. When Picard identifies an audio file, it can add new information to it, such as the recording artist, the album title, therecord label, and the date of release.[22]
ListenBrainz is a free and open source project that aims tocrowdsource listening data related to digital music and release it under anopen license.[23] It is a MetaBrainz Foundation project tied to MusicBrainz. It aims to re-implementLast.fm features that were lost following that platform's acquisition by CBS.[24][25]
ListenBrainz takes submissions in the form of "listens" representing the playback of songs or videos from various media players and services such asClementine/Strawberry,Music Player Daemon andSpotify or otherscrobbling mechanisms such asbrowser extensions. ListenBrainz can also import Last.fm andLibre.fm scrobbles in order to build listening history. As listens are released under an open license, ListenBrainz is useful for music research in industry and development research.[26][27][28][29]
^Shorter, Matthew (July 28, 2008)."BBC Music Artist Pages Beta".BBC Internet Blog.Archived from the original on January 24, 2009. RetrievedFebruary 12, 2009.
^"MusicBrainz".BBC Music.Archived from the original on July 28, 2019. RetrievedJuly 9, 2025.
^Vigliensoni, Gabriel; Fujinaga, Ichiro (October 23, 2017)."The Music Listening Histories Dataset"(PDF).Proceedings of the 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.Suzhou, China:ISMIR:96–102.doi:10.5281/zenodo.1417499.Archived(PDF) from the original on February 17, 2024. RetrievedFebruary 17, 2024 – via Zenodo.
.svg){kind=logo}
.svg){kind=logo}
.svg){kind=logo}
