MetaBrainz:Annual Report/2012

Year in review

It's been a year and a half since our last major schema update (NGS).

Our development team pushes out updates out approximately twice a month.

• Mini summit in London on Jan 30th.
• New data license
• Universal Music UK launches the Artist Gateway using MBIDs

MusicBrainz Picard version 1.0 was released in June and version 1.1 was released in September. Thank you Lukáš Lalinský (luks), Michael Wiencek (bitmap), and Wieland Hoffmann (mineo) for all your hard work this year!

• Hack weekend
• Ian hired

NES

Cover Art Archive

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 in an organised and convenient way. The Cover Art Archive was announced to the public in October 2012, but has been collecting images since May 2012. In the past 8 months we have amassed a collection of just under 140,000 pieces of cover art and are currently receiving between 400-600 new pieces each day!

We look forward to the day when the Cover Art Archive is seen as the de facto source of cover art images.

New customers

What does 8tracks do with our data?
Is The Echo Nest a new customer?

We had three new customers in 2012: 8tracks, AOL, and The Echo Nest.

AOL uses MusicBrainz data to provide info on tracks played in Winamp, and on their online artist pages.

Google Summer of Code

alastairp & demosdemon?

We had four students for Google Summer of Code 2012: Alastair Porter (alastairp), Daniel Bali (plaintext), Ian McEwen (ianmcorvidae), and Michael Wiencek (bitmap).

Alastair improved our collections system by fixing long-standing issues and adding new management features. Alastair was mentored by Oliver Charles (ocharles).

Daniel spent his summer using Splunk to dive into our server logs so that we can better understand our traffic patterns. Daniel was mentored by Robert Kaye (ruaok).

Ian broke language barriers and took on internationalisation support. Ian was mentored by Nikki. This is Ian's second Summer of Code with MusicBrainz.

Michael created the long sought after relationship editor. Michael was mentored by Kuno Woudt (warp). This is Michael's second Summer of Code with MusicBrainz.

MusicBrainz summit

The 12th MusicBrainz summit was held in Barcelona, Spain, from Nov 9-11th. The summit was attended by 22 people with 16 flying in from various parts of the world.

As in previous years, the summit has proven once again to be a fantastic experience, not just for the quality of discussions, but also the level of interaction between participants. With the Saturday group meal, socialising at the apartment and continued discussions during breaks at the summit itself, it was great to see people chatting, laughing and generally having a great time. An overview of what was discussed is available on our blog.

We thank Brewster Kahle, Google, Music Kickup, Oliver Charles, and Spotify for sponsoring our 12th summit. We especially thank the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra for both sponsoring the summit and being our local host. The summit would not have been possible without all of your contributions.

Looking forward

New Edit System (NES)

The New Generation Schema (NGS) update in 2011 made possible many new features, but it did not touch on our ageing edit system. We will be spending lots of development time in 2013 working on the New Edit System (NES) that will fix many of the weaknesses we've had with our current edit system such as not being able to group edits together or amend an edit once its been submitted.

Oliver Charles talks more about what NES is and how it will be implemented on his blog.

Finances

Income
Summit Sponsorship	$1,000.00
PayPal Donations	$9,374.94
General Donations	$72,931.50
Consulting	$2,500.00
Live Data Feed Licenses	$92,300.00
Bank Credits	$0.13
Bank Interest	$74.09
Amazon Associates	$829.54
Reimbursements	$2,212.10
Tagger Affiliate Program	$14,875.68
CC Data License	$6,450.00
Total Income	$202,547.98

Expenses
Officer Salary	$69,999.96
Bank	$845.00
PayPal	$1,235.56
WePay	$7.24
GSoC Summit Chocolate	$90.12
Rent	$4,056.00
Hardware	$1,547.59
Travel	$6,706.58
Internet	$264.38
Marketing	$1,000.00
Development	$105,587.27
Gifts	$37.70
Events	$929.80
Hosting	$18,775.00
Filing Fees	$120.00
Software	$488.00
Entertainment	$1,297.33
Insurance	$2,307.00
Accounting	$3,315.49
Payroll Taxes	$7,602.47
Total Expenses	$226,212.49

• Google made their annual $40,000 donation bringing their total support to over $200,000!
• $7500 anonymous donation from a record label

Fundraising

Any specific fundraising efforts this year?

Top contributors

Top editors
1	reosarevok	288689	13	dimpole	53400
2	Senax	128455	14	SultS	51580
3	drsaunde	104881	15	m___ah	50426
4	kaik	94718	16	RocknRollArchivist	49544
5	murdos	92016	17	ListMyCDs.com	46541
6	gswanjord	85843	18	nikki	40795
7	HibiscusKazeneko	73456	19	mat813	39266
8	mudcrow	72122	20	MrH	36363
9	rochusw	63692	21	pankkake	36265
10	monxton	59109	22	salo.rock	34573
11	fmera	55761	23	Hawke	28217
12	Sekhmetouserapis	54607	24	chabreyflint	27643

Top voters
1	pankkake	103003	13	Jazzy Jarilith	27521
2	mudcrow	83578	14	fmera	24868
3	MrH	75480	15	monxton	21741
4	chabreyflint	58593	16	Jokipii	21234
5	mat813	56957	17	sbontrager	21164
6	murdos	49297	18	MeinDummy	20424
7	viper666	34028	19	symphonick	16355
8	reosarevok	33934	20	ianmcorvidae	15980
9	salo.rock	32301	21	gswanjord	14946
10	Ataki	32271	22	nikki	14155
11	ListMyCDs.com	29343	23	drsaunde	12705
12	PhantomOTO	28093	24	mihhkel	11486