MusicBrainz Blog

The continued economic turmoil persisted in 2012 and thus it was a slow year for adding new customers for MetaBrainz. However, we did add one high profile customer in 2012: AOL Music.

For a number of reasons we felt that it was prudent to get MusicBrainz integrated into AOL before making public news about it. Now the time is finally right to talk about our relationship with AOL and Winamp. I had been talking to Geno Yoham (GM of Winamp) and Lisa Namerow (GM of AOL Music) about MusicBrainz at various conferences for several years. Forging relationships with large companies take a quite a long time and the formation of our relationship was really no different. At the end of 2011 Geno, Lisa and team were ready to take action and surprised me by pledging a sizeable donation to the MetaBrainz Foundation. This donation was received early in 2012 about the same time that we signed the data license contract. And just last week we received another donation for 2012!! Thanks AOL and Winamp!

Early in 2012 AOL launched updated services underpinned by MusicBrainz data:

• The Now Playing feature in Winamp allows a user to find out more about the artist that is currently playing in Winamp.
• The AOL Music Artist pages also use MusicBrainz data to display discography information and to provide some of the links for the other content shown on those pages.

Our relationship with AOL follows a similar pattern to our relationship to the BBC. The BBC has done wonders for highlighting and lending credibility to MusicBrainz and I expect that our relationship with AOL will bring about similar benefits for MusicBrainz.

Thank you team AOL and especially to Geno Yoham and Lisa Namerow for believing in us!

I’m pleased to announce that 7digital and The Echo Nest have become our latest customers!

7digital enables a lot of digital music stores and provides a lot of services for mobile operators. 7digital has relationships with many labels and thus faces complex metadata issues. I’m quite pleased that 7digital has chosen to partner with MusicBrainz to fix these metadata issues.

The Echo Nest provides tons of digital music services and is a driving force behind Music Hack Days here in the States. The Echo Nest also created project Rosetta Stone, a service that translates to/from MusicBrainz IDs from/to other ID spaces like the Echo Nest IDs or Rdio IDs.

Welcome to the MusicBrainz ecosystem!

As part of Google’s Summer of Code program we accepted Dániel Bali to work on analyzing our web server logs to mine them for interesting information about MusicBrainz and people who are using MusicBrainz. (see a preview of this project)

To make that project a reality we had help from Splunk, the company that creates the fantastic data analysis tool by the same name. Splunk provided us with enterprise trial licenses during the summer and now going forward has accepted us into their Splunk for Good program. This program provides a free 10GB/day (it allows us to import 10GB of data into our Splunk server per day) license on a yearly basis.

We now count Splunk among our sponsors and we’re looking forward to rolling out Dániel’s work in October. Thank you Splunk and thank you to Joyce Morrell and Christy Wilson from Splunk for working with us to make this happen!

I’m pleased to announce that Matthew Hawn from Last.fm has joined our board of directors. Matthew is a veteran of the music industry who has worked for big music labels in the past and today fills the role of VP of Product at Last.fm. Matthew joining our board of directors reflects our shared history and the closer collaboration between MusicBrainz and Last.fm

Welcome on board Matthew!

Matthew replaces outgoing director Derek Sivers. Derek, the founder of CD Baby, has been with MetaBrainz since its beginning of the organization and has looked out for us many times. We really appreciate everything you’ve done for us Derek!

UPDATE: Fixed Matthew’s title.

Once again, Google has donated $40,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation in support of MusicBrainz. Thank you Chris DiBona and Cat Allman at the Open Source Programs Office at Google! Your support has helped MusicBrainz along more than any other organization — thank you for your continued support!

In an effort to retire some old power-hungry servers, we’ve moved MusicBrainz Classic to a new server and also created a new MetaBrainz Foundation web site. The new MetaBrainz site looks like the MusicBrainz NGS site and shares a bit of the same code.

Please open a bug if you find problems with either of these two sites.

Thanks to Ollie for hacking together the metabrainz site!

I’m very happy to announce that another organization has made a large donation to MusicBrainz. Like our other donation from 2012, this company would also like to remain anonymous for the time being.

There is one thing very different about this donation: Its from a record label!

Not too long ago we didn’t have any contacts with record labels and the record labels didn’t really want much to do with us, but that has changed. This signals a deeper adoption of MusicBrainz in the music industry, which I find quite interesting and exciting!

Thank you for your generosity, anonymous donor!

I’m pleased to announce that an anonymous company decided to donate a pile of 20 Supermicro servers to us!! I’ve tallied up and estimated a value for all of these servers and it comes to $49,480!

Out of that pile of servers, I’ve built 10 servers that are very close to the servers that we purchased during our fundraiser last year. Two servers are nearly ready for use and a bunch of other servers decorate (read: fill up) my tiny office. Thanks so much to our anonymous donors — you’re going to help us grow over the next couple of years! With the rate at which our traffic is growing, the timing of this donation couldn’t be better!

If anyone wants to send dark chocolate to our donors as a thank you, please do! Just send them to MetaBrainz and I’ll pass them on our friends.

The timing of this donation was especially spot-on since it put us into the black for 2011. With a scant excess revenue (retained earnings) of $4,166.91 on revenues of $239,756.07, we barely made it. Phew. See our financial reports for all of 2011, if you care to get more details!

That closes an exciting year for MusicBrainz/MetaBrainz! We hope to have the annual report published before the month is out.

Thanks for an amazing 2011 everyone!

I just posted the Profit & Loss for 2010 for the MetaBrainz Foundation!

Short summary: We earned $177k and we’re in the black by almost $5k, but we’re still not raking in the bucks.

But, a tiny non-profit being in the black for this crappy economic climate is awesome and makes me happy. Watch for a full annual report coming in the next few weeks!