How to Contribute

Contribute to MusicBrainz

There are a number of ways that you can contribute to the MusicBrainz project. You may contribute money, data, moderation effort, source code, documentation or testing effort:

Contribute Money

If you feel that MusicBrainz is a worthwhile effort, please consider contributing money to the MetaBrainz Foundation. The MetaBrainz Foundation is a 501.(c).3 tax-exempt non-profit based in California that operates the MusicBrainz project. All of your donations will be tax-deductible and you will receive a receipt that you can use to deduct your donation off your taxes if you are a US taxpayer.

Your donations will be used to operate the MusicBrainz project. This includes paying for ongoing expenses like hosting, hardware, maintaining a modest office in San Luis Obispo, California, and possibly even paying a minimal salary for MetaBrainz employees working on MusicBrainz -- if there is enough money in the budget to afford that.

O'Reilly and Associates started it off with a $500 contribution to MusicBrainz. (In return RobertKaye had to shave the P2P logo into his hair for the fall P2P conference). Since then, hundreds of donors have given anything from 50 cents to over $2000.

To send money, please head to over to this dedicated page on the MetaBrainz web site.

• How will we use your money? See our non-profit white paper.
• Where has it gone? See our transparent finances.
• Who else is contributing? See our sponsors.

Contribute Data

There are several ways that you can contribute data to MusicBrainz:

• Download Picard - the official MusicBrainz tagger - and use it to identify and clean up your MP3, WAV and Ogg Vorbis collection. The Tagger will attempt to automatically identify your files and walk you through the process of matching up the unidentified files.
• Still using the PicardTagger, pop an Audio CD into your CD-ROM drive, click the lookup button and follow the instructions from there to contribute DiscIDs.
• Use the web interface to add artists, albums and tracks. Start here to add a new artist, or use the search page to go to an artist page. From the artist page you can click on the Add Release or Add Track links to start contributing.

Maintain the Existing Data

To maintain the existing data, use the search page to log in as an editor and view the metadata collection. If you spot mistakes, missing data, or too much data in the database, then please use the Edit, Delete and Merge links on the artist/album pages.

Each change that you make to the database gets entered into the MusicBrainz moderation system. The other MusicBrainz users will then have the opportunity to vote on your changes to make sure that they are correct and they meet our StyleGuidelines. Check out HowEditingWorks and HowVotingWorks for more information on the moderation system, or go straight to the moderation pages.

Contribute Source Code / Testing / Documentation

Last, but certainly not least, you may also contribute your software engineering efforts in order to advance the MusicBrainzDevelopment. MusicBrainz is dedicated to the Open Source software development model, and thus the server and client libraries are available under the GPL (GNU General Public License) and LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License), respectively.

If you're a programmer, please help out and write some code. Even if you are not a programmer you can help to advance MusicBrainz -- we will always need people to help test new features and write documentation for the things we've already created. To jump in, join the MusicBrainz MailingList.