MusicBrainz Entity

Entity Types

Relevant video:

Artist

Artists are generally a musician, group of musicians, a collaboration of multiple musicians or other music professionals who contribute to works described in the MusicBrainz Database They can also be a non-musical person (like a photographer, an illustrator, or a poet whose writings are set to music), or even a fictional character.

Artist credits are a list of artists, variations of artist names and pieces of text to join the artist names.

Event

An organised event which people can attend, and is relevant to MusicBrainz. Events generally refer to live performances, like concerts and festivals.

Label

Labels are generally imprints on releases, and to a lesser extent, the record companies behind those imprints.

Place

Places are areas smaller than a geographical region (like a building or an outdoor area) used to perform or produce music. It could range from a stadium to a religious building to an indoor arena.

Recording

Recordings are unique audio data. It has a title, artist credit, duration, and ISRCs. Recordings can be linked to tracks on releases. Each track must always be associated with a single recording, but a recording can be linked to any number of tracks.

Release

Releases are real-world release objects (like a physical album) that you can buy in your music store. When a musical product is issued on a specific date with specific information such as the country, label, barcode and packaging, it is a release.

A medium is a piece of media included in a release. It contains information about the format, position in the release and an optional title as well as a list of tracks. Several media exist, including but not limited to: CD, 12" vinyl, digital media. A medium normally has a tracklist.

A track contains a link to a recording, title, artist credit and the position on the medium. A track is different from a recording in that it is unique to a release; a number of different releases can contain the same recording.

Release Group

Release groups are an abstract "album" entity. Technically it's a group of releases, with a specified type.

Series

A series is a sequence of separate release groups, releases, recordings, works or events with a common theme. The theme is usually prominent in the branding of the entities in the series and the individual entities will often have been given a number indicating the position in the series.

URL

A URL represents a regular Internet Uniform Resource Locator and an associated description of that URL. Unlike other entities, URLs are not visible.

Work

One layer above recordings ("song", "composition", etc.). While recording represents audio data, work represents the composition behind the recording.

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The following entities can only be added by privileged users:

Area

Areas are historical and existing geographic regions. Areas include countries, sub-divisions, counties, municipalities, cities, districts and islands. To request that an area be added to MusicBrainz submit a bug request under the AREQ category.

Instrument

Instruments are devices created or adapted to make musical sounds. See how to request an instrument here.