MetaBrainz:Annual Report/2013
Year in review
- mini summit in UK
- May release: areas, instrument credits (WIP), work attributes (WIP), partially moved relationship docs to the DB, removed tracklists and added track IDs
- kuno left in july
- GSoC
- Oct release: Places, video attribute
- DE summit
- ollie left
- bitmap hired
New customers
We had four new customers in 2013: 7digital, BandPage, InterTech Media, and Spotify.
7digital uses MusicBrainz data in their digital content platform to provide consumers, partners and developers with open access to an extensive international catalogue of high quality digital content. BandPage uses MusicBrainz data for their services. InterTech Media uses MusicBrainz to provide services to radio stations to power their "recently played" listings. Spotify uses MusicBrainz data in their music streaming services.
13.05 schema change
This release introduced a new core entity called area. This entity allows us to capture information about countries, subdivisions, cities, and other geographic regions. We currently have information on just under 88,000 areas.
Another addition was support for ISNI codes. These codes make it easier to cross-reference data in MusicBrainz with other databases.
13.10 schema change
This release added another core entity called place. This entity allows us to capture information about physical buildings such as recording studios as well as outdoor venues. We currently have information on just under 3,000 places. Place support was added by Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok) during our 2013 Summer of Code.
The other major change in this release was to add a recording attribute that identifies the recording as a video. This is useful for situations where a DVD contains both audio and video recordings.
Google Summer of Code
We had three students for Google Summer of Code 2013: Michael Wiencek (bitmap), Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok), and Maciej Czerwiński (mjjc).
This was Michael's third Summer of Code with us. This year he took on the daunting challenge of improving our release editor and he, yet again, produced some amazing work. Most of his improvements were behind the scenes, but the visible result for users will be a major improvement in speed. The new release editor is still in the review and testing process and has an expected ship date of the end of February. Michael was mentored by Ian McEwen (ianmcorvidae), another MusicBrainz Summer of Code veteran.
Nicolás took on the task of adding place support. This was an extension of the area support added earlier in the year. There is an excellent introduction and visualization of places on our blog. Nicolás was mentored by Nikki.
Maciej's proposal was to create a CC-licensed repository for music reviews. This would be a site that allows anyone to write a non-neutral point of view review that could then be integrated with MusicBrainz and its data. The project __________. Maciej was mentored by Rob.
MusicBrainz summit
The 13th MusicBrainz summit was held in Berlin, Germany, from Sept 20-22nd. The summit was attended by 15 members of the MusicBrainz community as well as Anders Arpteg from Spotify and Lydia Pintscher from Wikimedia / Wikidata.
The summit was very productive and resulted in several actionable tasks. An overview of the summit is available on our blog, and there is also a detailed listing of discussed topics.
We thank Google and Spotify for sponsoring the 2013 summit, and to Wikimedia Deutschland for hosting and providing good internet!
Looking forward
Ingestion (Geordi)
Finances
Our finances in 2013 are summarized by our Profit & Loss statement:
| Income | |
|---|---|
| General Donations | $72,042.49 |
| PayPal Donations | $6,035.07 |
| Live Data Feed Licenses | $179,510.55 |
| Summit Sponsorship | $7,500.00 |
| Consulting | $1,500.00 |
| CC Data License | $9,160.00 |
| Web Service Access | $660.00 |
| Amazon Affiliate Program | $1,048.65 |
| Tagger Affiliate Program | $10,445.05 |
| CD Baby Affiliate Program | $5.95 |
| Bank Interest | $54.55 |
| Total Income | $287,962.31 |
| Expenses | |
|---|---|
| Development | $98,828.69 |
| Officer Salary | $75,429.95 |
| Community Manager | $10,893.07 |
| Hosting | $21,425.00 |
| Bank | $1,278.78 |
| PayPal | $1,056.18 |
| WePay | $21.11 |
| Rent | $854.00 |
| Utilities | $68.90 |
| Hardware | $3,331.65 |
| Travel | $3,019.87 |
| Internet | $649.43 |
| Marketing | $1,000.00 |
| Gifts | $116.48 |
| Events | $7,182.43 |
| Filing Fees | $70.00 |
| Software | $488.00 |
| Insurance | $2,258.00 |
| Accounting | $1,871.00 |
| Total Expenses | $229,842.54 |
Traffic
This traffic graph conveys only the requests made to the main http://musicbrainz.org servers.
Top contributors
| Top voters | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | pankkake | 99,925 | 13 | mat813 | 13,266 |
| 2 | chabreyflint | 94,371 | 14 | spl0k | 12,838 |
| 3 | fmera | 50,083 | 15 | murdos | 12,193 |
| 4 | viper666 | 49,076 | 16 | jesus2099 | 11,455 |
| 5 | Ataki | 39,371 | 17 | drsaunde | 11,450 |
| 6 | reosarevok | 38,436 | 18 | MeinDummy | 10,248 |
| 7 | Jazzy Jarilith | 33,696 | 19 | teleguise | 9,513 |
| 8 | MrH | 33,493 | 20 | otters61 | 9,129 |
| 9 | salo.rock | 32,098 | 21 | monxton | 8,902 |
| 10 | ListMyCDs.com | 22,971 | 22 | nikki | 7,003 |
| 11 | Zas | 22,136 | 23 | KRSCuan | 6,797 |
| 12 | sbontrager | 16,988 | 24 | steinbdj | 6,549 |
| Top editors | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | m___ah | 305,683 | 13 | Sekhmetouserapis | 51,980 |
| 2 | reosarevok | 208,415 | 14 | SultS | 48,588 |
| 3 | ListMyCDs.com | 192,558 | 15 | nikki | 46,673 |
| 4 | Senax | 146,402 | 16 | mudcrow | 46,628 |
| 5 | kaik | 132,484 | 17 | MrH | 45,997 |
| 6 | drsaunde | 117,819 | 18 | Hawke | 39,714 |
| 7 | HibiscusKazeneko | 85,221 | 19 | Phil.B | 38,812 |
| 8 | monxton | 78,047 | 20 | jesus2099 | 38,728 |
| 9 | loujin | 69,682 | 21 | yeeeargh | 37,257 |
| 10 | otters61 | 63,110 | 22 | salo.rock | 35,332 |
| 11 | rochusw | 53,965 | 23 | dimpole | 33,473 |
| 12 | fmera | 53,865 | 24 | chabreyflint | 32,904 |
Blah blah blah
Large donations added up to _______ including $40,000 from Google, $10,000 from AOL, and _________.
Server farm
At the end of 2013, MusicBrainz had 20 machines in service. From the top, going down:
- rika: User sandbox machine (mbsandbox.org)
- lolo: An extra front end web server
- scooby: ftp, system statistics, blog
- pino: MetaBrainz, MusicBrainz Classic, Cover Art Archive
- baron: Database failover server
- hoser: VM host (forums, blog)
- dagon: Backup server (not in use)
- rocko: Geordi / log analysis
- cartman: Classic search server, index builder
- wiley: New catch all server: SVN, git, jira, wiki, trac, mail, backups
- Gir: Network router (not visible)
- carl: Redundant network gateway
- lenny: Redundant network gateway
- sakura: Backup server (not in use)
- asterix: web server
- astro: web server
- roobarb: search server
- pingu: web server
- dora: search server, memcached server
- totoro: database server
Not shown: Hobbes (Mac mini, tucked away in the back), continuous integration (jenkins), replicated search indexes
MusicBrainz uses ____ Mbits of bandwidth per second on average (____ Mbps inbound, _____ Mbps outbound) and draws ____ Amps of current for a power consumption of about _____ Watts. MusicBrainz physically occupies 20 Us of space (half of a rack) at Digital West in San Luis Obispo, CA.
Words of appreciation
Many thanks to our editors, voters, peer reviewers, bug watchers and other members of our community -- without you MusicBrainz would not be what it is today!
We'd like to also thank our developers that pushed out dozens of releases of the site, Picard and our numerous client libraries. All of your work is critical to enabling the MusicBrainz community to do its job.
We'd also like to thank our awesome Board of Directors, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, all of the donors who contributed money and all of our customers.
In particular we'd like to thank AOL, Google, and Spotify for their large donations made in 2013. These large contributions allow us to carry on with our goal of making MusicBrainz the most comprehensive music encyclopedia out there!
Thank you to everyone who contributed in 2013!
