MusicBrainz Database

Products > Database

Introduction

The MusicBrainz database stores all the data of the MusicBrainz music metadata catalogue. This data includes information about artists, releases, tracks, labels and relationships between them. It also contains information about the MusicBrainz users (editors) and the changes they have entered into the database (edits).

Data Overview

Artist data includes

• A MusicBrainz ID (MBID)
• Name
• Sortname for displaying the artist name in a sorted list
• Common aliases and misspellings
• Type (person/group)
• Begin date, a birth date or formation date, depending on type
• End date, a death date or dissolution date, depending on type
• Comment, a short disambiguation field that distinguishes artists with same or similar names
• Annotation, a free form text field that allows editors to make notes about the artist

Release data includes

• A MusicBrainz ID (MBID)
• Title
• Artist
• Type (album, single, EP, compilation, soundtrack, spokenword, interview, audiobook, live, remix, other)
• Status (official, promotion, bootleg, pseudo-release)
• Language (see ISO 639)
• Annotation, a free form text field that allows editors to make notes about this release
• Disc ID (zero or more disc IDs that allow audio CD identification)
• Amazon ASIN, an Amazon.com product code, suitable for linking to cover art.
• Release events that each contain:
  • Release date
  • Release country
  • Label
  • Catalog number
  • Barcode (EAN/UPC)
  • Format (CD, cassette, vinyl, wax cylinder, etc.)

Track data includes

• A MusicBrainz ID (MBID)
• Title
• Artist
• Duration (in milliseconds)
• Annotation, a free form text field that allows editors to make notes about this
• PUID, the MusicIP acoustic fingerprint identifier for this track.
• ISRC (limited amounts of data right now, since collecting ISRC data started in May 2009)

Label data includes

• A MusicBrainz ID (MBID)
• Name
• Sortname for displaying the label name is a sorted list
• Common aliases and misspellings
• Type (original production, bootleg production, reissue production, distributor, holding)
• Code, the IFPI Label Code
• Begin date (formation date)
• End date (dissolution date)
• Comment, a short disambiguation field that distinguishes labels with same or similar names
• Annotation, a free form text field that allows editors to make notes about the label
• Country (ISO 3166 Codes)

Each of these Artist, Release, Track and Label entities can be linked with Advanced Relationships that provide a rich tapestry of data relationships. Advanced relationships provide information about web resources (e.g. Wikipedia pages, download locations, etc) for entities and they can indicate instrument/vocal performances on a piece of music. These relationships allow MusicBrainz to capture most of the data contained in the liner and liner notes for an Audio CD. For more details on these relationships, please read our Advanced Relationships page.

Download

The MusicBrainz database is built on the PostgreSQL relational database engine. Therefore the data files are provided in the PostgreSQL "COPY TO" format, only really suitable for restoring to a PostgreSQL database. See the Database Schema documentation for a description of the schema, and what each of the tables are used for.

see the Database Download page for instructions on how to download the dumps.

Installation

There are a few contributed guidelines how to setup the database on different systems. See Database Setup for the list of available documents. The easiest way to get a running database is to install a Virtual MusicBrainz Server.

License

The data collected by the MusicBrainz project is made available to the public under open licenses. Some of the data is available under the Public Domain, and some under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (See MusicBrainz License for more details).

Live data-feed (or Replication)

The live data-feed enables a server running a PostgreSQL database in conjunction with the MusicBrainz Server to automatically stay in synch with the main server (See Live Data Feed for more details).