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The Music Database

World's Biggest Open Source Music Database

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MusicBrainz is an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public.

MusicBrainz aims to be:

The ultimate source of music information by allowing anyone to contribute and releasing the data under open licenses.
The universal lingua franca for music by providing a reliable and unambiguous form of music identification, enabling both people and machines to have meaningful conversations about music.
Like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz is maintained by a global community of users and we want everyone — including you — to participate and contribute.

1.88 M

Artists

3.00 M

Releases

35.20 M

Tracks

2.18 M

Editors

Other MetaBrainz Projects

MusicBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a California based non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source. Explore the fellow Brainz projects as well!

An open record of user listening habits

ListenBrainz keeps tracks of what music you listen to and provides you with insights into your listening habits. We're completely open-source and publish our data as open data. You can use ListenBrainz to track your music listening habits and share your taste with others using our visualizations.

A cross-platform music tagger

Picard can add metadata tags to your music files, based on information available from the MusicBrainz website. It can look up the metadata either manually or automatically based on existing information, including artist and song name, disc id (for CDs), and a track’s AcoustID fingerprint and retrieve and embed coverart images from a variety of sources.

A crowdsourced collection of acoustic information

The AcousticBrainz project aims to crowd source acoustic information for all music in the world and to make it available to the public. This acoustic information describes the acoustic characteristics of music and includes low-level spectral information and information for genres, moods, keys, scales and much more.

A repository of music cover art that is freely and easily accessible

The Cover Art Archive is a joint project between the Internet Archive and MusicBrainz, whose goal is to make cover art images available to everyone on the Internet in an organised and convenient way. Images in the archive are curated by the MusicBrainz community and go through a peer review process to ensure that they are correct, free of spam and of the best quality.

A repository for Creative Commons licensed music reviews

CritiqueBrainz is a repository for Creative Commons licensed music reviews. Here you can read what other people have written about an album or event and write your own review!

An open encyclopedia which contains information about published literature

BookBrainz is a project to create an online database of information about every single book, magazine, journal and other publication ever written. We make all the data that we collect available to the whole world to consume and use as they see fit.

Explore MusicBrainz

Community Driven

MusicBrainz is a community-maintained open source encyclopedia of music information. This means that anyone — including you — can help contribute to the project by adding information about your favorite artists and their works.

Development

If you have a digital music collection, MusicBrainz Picard will help you tag your files. If you are a developer, our developer resources will help you in making use of our data. If you are a commercial user, our live data feed will provide your local database with replication packets to keep it in sync.

History

In 2000, Gracenote took over the free CDDB project and commercialized it, essentially charging users for accessing the very data they themselves contributed. In response, Robert Kaye founded MusicBrainz. The project has since grown rapidly from a one-man operation to an international community of enthusiasts that appreciates both music and music metadata. Along the way, the scope of the project has expanded from its origins as a mere CDDB replacement to the true music encyclopedia MusicBrainz is today.

MusicBrainz Database

The MusicBrainz Database stores all of the various pieces of information we collect about music, from artists and their releases to works and their composers, and much more. Most of the data in the MusicBrainz Database is licensed under CC0, which effectively places the data into the Public Domain. The remaining data is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. All our data is available for commercial licensing. If you are interested in licensing this data for commercial use, please contact us.

Varied and Never Ending

As an encyclopedia and as a community, MusicBrainz exists only to collect as much information about music as we can. We do not discriminate or prefer one "type" of music over another, and we try to collect information about as many different types of music as possible. Whether it is published or unpublished, popular or fringe, western or non-western, human or non-human — we want it all in MusicBrainz.

Editing Philosophy

Maintaining a comprehensive database of all types of music is a large task, and MusicBrainz depends on its users to spot mistakes in the database and then to take the initiative to correct these errors. To help with that task the MusicBrainz editing and voting system was designed, it gives MusicBrainz users the ability to update and maintain the database effectively and easily.