MusicBrainz now supports venues and studios via our new “place” entity!
This was one of our Google Summer of Code projects for this year and many thanks to Nicolás Tamargo for his work on it. We released his work a few weeks ago and after a few initial hiccups, it’s looking good and we want to let you all know about it. 🙂
So what can we do with places?
The most obvious thing we can do now is store information about recording, mixing and mastering locations.
For example, the studios listed in the credits for Universe by Kyoko Fukada:
and the venue for the recordings on Live in Cartoon Motion by Mika:
We can of course link the place to a variety of external sites, as can be seen in the list of URLs for Wembley Arena:
Some places are made up of several parts. In those cases, we can link one place as being part of another. For example the various studios at Abbey Road Studios:
or the hall and theatre of the Barbican Centre:
We were already able to add engineers to the database as artists, now we can also say which studio they work at, as seen here for the studio Railroad Tracks:
Many orchestras and sometimes other artists have a home venue where they perform on a regular basis. These can now be linked, like in you can see for the Barbican Centre: Barbican Hall:
A premiere is sometimes held for a work and now we can link those works to where the premiere was held, e.g. the following works which were premiered at Carnegie Hall:
The place can also have coordinates, which make it possible to pinpoint the location on a map. The MusicBrainz website doesn’t show any maps at present, but here’s a map of all places with coordinates by Mineo:
Events?
No, we do not yet support events.
Thanks to nikki for writing this post.
MetaBrainz Blog 
Thanks! It’s good to see a blog post written in a user friendly manner, for once 😉
Great addition!
Hopefully, if a map makes it to the website, it will be using OpenStreetMap data! Wouldn’t that make a lot of sense?
Cheers!
@chtfn — absolutely! The places map that Mineo made is also available using an OSM-based map at http://mbsandbox.org/~ianmcorvidae/places/places.html and the plan is certainly to use OSM data for embedded maps (I believe using the MapQuest Open tileserver). Until then, pages for places that have coordinates link to openstreetmap.org.
Good work!
Note you can triangulate the data between Wikipedia/Wikidata, Musicbrainz and OpenStreetmap in a similar way to the WIWOSM project does:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WIWOSM
In short, notable buildings in OpenStreetmap can point to their relevant Wikipedia page and so if you know the Wikipedia page, you can work backwards from there to find the object in the OSM database and then you can link to the outline of the building, rather than just a co-ordinate e.g.
Map centered on current Musicbrainz co-ordinates for Barbican Centre:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.5202&mlon=-0.095#map=16/51.5202/-0.0950
A map with the the actual building highlighted:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?way=34038687
And since you’re linking to actual “thing” in OSM you can also directly access a page that gives more data stored about the building, and offers quick links to edit it:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/34038687
This would probably also be handy for showing places within Areas, e.g. the Wikipedia page for New York City or The Bronx have a co-ordinate in the top right corner which will be some point near the geographical centre, but thanks to WIWOSM they also have a dropdown map with the outline of the extent of that area with pinpoints for other geo-located articles within it or nearby. (This map is the WikiMiniAtlas for the english wikipedia and the extra option of WIWOSM map on the german wikipedia, but I believe the data for the shape outlines in both comes from OSM via WIWOSM).