MusicBrainz Blog

(Yes, this report is a year late — I had spent a lot of time on the annual report for 2006 and got so little feedback on it that I assumed no one cared. But now in 2008 I’ve been getting many more requests, so I’ve gone back and with the help of Pavan compiled the stats for 2007.)

Profit & Loss

In 2007 the foundation took in $89,645.59 and spent $64,543.84 for a total profit of $25,101.75. (non-profits can still earn a profit, but that profit must be reinvested into the company, not paid out to its officers and directors.) A detailed break down of where the income came from and where it went to is shown below:

Income

Direct donations	$30,205.00
PayPal donations	$14,575.59
Consulting (GSoC Mentor income)	$1,500
Live Data Feed licenses	$30,340.47
CC Data Licenses	$1,900.00
Interest	$357.45
Amazon Associates	$714.39
Tagger Affiliates	$10,052,69
Total income:	89,645.59

Expense

Bank fees	$64.65
PayPal fees	$1,570.92
Rent	$2,779.00
Hardware	$732.06
Travel	$2,933.49
Internet	$89.01
Marketing	$765.00
Development	$39,500
Supplies	$56.88
Events	$400.92
Hosting	$12,240.00
Filing Fees	$25.00
Software	$-41.45
Entertainment	$27.32
Insurance	$1,996.00
Accounting	$1,200.00
Total expense:	$64,543.84

This Profit & Loss shows:

• It cost $12,972.06 to host MusicBrainz in 2007 — this includes hardware and hosting costs.
• PayPal donations, which represent end-user support for MusicBrainz, came to $14,575.59, 16.3% of our total income. The Foundation aims to have end-user donations pay for the actual cost of running the service and the end-users did in fact pay for slightly more than what it cost to host MusicBrainz in 2007!
• As it is with a lot of companies, salaries accounted for the largest slice of expenses. The Foundation paid $39,500 in salaries to Robert Kaye in 2007, which was still far below a reasonable salary level for an Engineer/Executive Director in California.
• $32,240.47 was earned licensing the MusicBrainz data for commercial use, which represents 40% of the total income.

In 2007 the foundation spent $12,972.06 on hosting and hardware costs and served out 725 million web hits and 386 million web service hits. Calculating a cost per hit, we find that we spent $17.89 per one million web hits and $33.58 per one million web service hits. These values are up slightly from the 2006 values of $17.56 and $30.58 respectively.

Balance Sheet

The balance sheet for the end of 2007 showed the MetaBrainz Foundation with $14,323.45 retained earnings, a net income of $25,101.75 and total cash assets of $39,525.20.

Traffic

The following chart shows our traffic growth for 2007 and 2008:

The blue line represents the overall number of hits to musicbrainz.org. The red line shows how many of the overall hits were web service (API) hits; as you can see towards the end of 2007 half of our overall hits were web service hits.

Top data contributors

Top editors:

drsaunde	125665
ojnkpjg	106211
brianfreud	102090
mudcrow	44423
murdos	32111
teleguise	26541
dmppanda	23264
cooperaa	16705
Schika	16420
zout	16160
voiceinsideyou	15268
artysmokes	13380
Kerensky97	12174
foolip	11403
lukz	11031
bench12345	10014
AnAlach	9323
gioele	8742
headlocker	8450
Pianissimo84	8364
SenRepus	8183
leivhe	7815
Liff	7748
lytron	7740
zos18	7533

Top voters:

drsaunde	47850
ojnkpjg	41365
brianfreud	27382
voiceinsideyou	19874
cooperaa	19348
headlocker	16183
lukz	13792
mudcrow	12861
gioele	11259
cadalach	10677
bogdanb	10496
CatCat	9214
symphonick	8767
teleguise	8571
Dr. Default	8313
BrianG	7936
crazee_canuck	7842
keschte	7838
cybercox	7802
Xaiver	7699
Pianissimo84	7175
murdos	7165
artysmokes	6495
helver	6349
debris77	6276

A big thank you to all of the editors/voters who contributed!

This entry was posted by mayhem on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Annual Report, MetaBrainz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.