About

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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 related works.

In 2000, Gracenote took over the free CDDB project and commercialized it, essentially charging users for access to the very data they had 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 who appreciate both music and music metadata. Along the way, the scope of the project has expanded from its origins as a mere a CDDB replacement to today, where MusicBrainz has become a true encyclopedia of music.

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 Whether it is published/unpublished, popular/fringe, western/non-western, human/non-human - we want it all to be entered into MusicBrainz.

MusicBrainz Database

The MusicBrainz Database is where all of the various pieces of information we collect about music are stored, from artists and their releases to works and their composers, and of course much more. Note: We do not actually store or have access to any of the music recordings!

The majority of the data in the MusicBrainz Database is licensed under the CC0, which is effectively placing the data into the Public Domain. That means that anyone can download the data and use it in any way they see fit. The remaining data is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

All of our data is available for commercial licensing. If you are interested in licensing this data for commercial use, please contact us.

What can I do with MusicBrainz?

If you have a digital music collection, MusicBrainz Picard will help you tag your files.

If you are a developer, our developer resources will assist 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.

MetaBrainz Foundation

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MusicBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source.

If you feel that MusicBrainz is a worthwhile effort, please consider making a donation to help support further growth and development.