About/Data License

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Products > MusicBrainz Database > Data Licences

The data collected by the MusicBrainz project falls into two categories explained below. Any user that contributes to MusicBrainz should be aware that their contributions will be made available to the public under the licenses described below. Furthermore, MusicBrainz users give the MetaBrainz Foundation the right to license this data for commercial use. The income from these licenses keeps MusicBrainz running and covers the paychecks of paid MusicBrainz developers.

Public Domain Data

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The core data of the MusicBrainz dataset is placed into the Public Domain, which means that anyone can download and use the core data in any way they see fit. No restictions, no worries! The core data consists of the following pieces of data. The SQL tablenames are shown in parentheses after the description of the data:

The live data feed that we offer to replicate the MusicBrainz data is a slight exception to the rules above, since both Public Domain data and Creative Commons data (see below) are intermingled in the data update packets. Given that the highest common license denominator needs to be applied to these data packets, the Creative Commons license governs the live data-feeds.

To get the freely available Public Domain data, please download a data snapshot from the database download page.

Creative Commons Licensed Data

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The remaining portions of the MusicBrainz data are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. This allows non commercial use of the MusicBrainz data as long as MusicBrainz is given credit and that derivative works (works based on MusicBrainz CC licensed data) are also made available under the same license. For more information on the Creative Commons and their licenses, please refer to the Creative Commons home page.

The Creative Commons licensed data portions are: (The SQL tablenames are shown in parentheses after the description of the data)

  • Metadata tables (including ratings and lastupdated info) (album_amazon_asin, albummeta, artist_meta, label_meta, release_group_meta, track_meta)
  • Search indexes (wordlist, artistwords, albumwords, release_groupwords, trackwords, labelwords)
  • Annotations (annotation)
  • Folksonomy tags (tag, artist_tag, release_tag, label_tag, track_tag)
  • Statistics (currentstat, historicalstat, stats, puidjoin_stat, puid_stat)
  • Edits (automod_election, moderation_note_open, moderation_open, moderator, vote_open)
  • Closed edits (moderation_closed, moderation_note_closed, vote_closed)
  • Artist relationships (Similar artists, not advanced relationships) (artist_relation) (Data provided by Agent Arts)
  • Live Data Feed -- please see live data feed for more details on our continuous update stream.
  • Documentation and Wiki content

To get the Creative Commons licensed data, please download a data snapshot from the database download page.