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MusicBrainz is a community-maintained, open source encyclopedia of music information. This means that anyone — including you — cancontribute to the project by adding information about your favorite artists and their works. As an encyclopedia and a community, MusicBrainz exists to collect as much information about music as possible. We do not discriminate or prefer one genre of music to another, and we try to collect information about as many different types of music as we can. Whether it is published or unpublished, popular or fringe, western or non-western, played by humans or computer generated – we want it all recorded in MusicBrainz.

In 1998, the founders of the free and open sourceCDDB project sold it toEscient, a consumer A/V device manufacturer. Less than two years later, Escient suspended access to the originalGPL‑licensed database and rebranded the project asGracenote, a commercialized service with a proprietary license that began charging users for accessing the very data they themselves originally contributed!

In response, Robert Kaye foundedMusicBrainz onJuly 17, 2000, a not-for-profit collaborative music database that aims to fill the void left by CDDB. The project grew rapidly from a one-man operation to an international community of enthusiasts that have created the world's largest catalog of open music metadata. Along the way, the scope of the project has expanded from a mere CDDB replacement to the rich, expansive music encyclopedia that MusicBrainz is today, with the bulk of its contents in the public domain.

TheMusicBrainz Database stores all of the music information that we collect, from artists and their releases to works and their composers, and much more.

Note: We do not actually store or have access to any music recordings.

Most of the data in our database is published using theCreative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal license. This means you candownload the data and use it however you like. Remaining data is released under the terms of theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

All of our data is available for commercial licensing, too. If you are interested in licensing data for commercial use, pleasecontact us.

If you have a digital music collection, our free file tagging application,MusicBrainz Picard, can help you tag your files.

If you are a software developer, ourdeveloper resources show some of the myriad ways in which you can use the data.

If you are a commercial user, ourlive data feed can provide your local database with the replication packets required to keep it in sync with ours.

If you are a music fan, you cancontribute data to the database, immortalizing your favourite artists.

MusicBrainz is operated by theMetaBrainz Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source. If you share our vision for an accurate, permanent and open catalog of information about all of the music humans have made, are making and will continue to make – please considerdonating to help support further growth and development.