Announcing the Event Art Archive

In 2012 we proudly announced the Cover Art Archive (CAA), a cooperation between MusicBrainz and the Internet Archive to store and deliver high resolution release imagery in multiple formats. Today we have over 2.5 million releases with cover art, making up 60.7% of all releases in MusicBrainz! Every day another ~1,300 releases have cover art added (CAA statistics/timeline).

Now we take the next step, and are proud to announce the Event Art Archive (EAA). Again we have worked with our friends at the Internet Archive to transform MusicBrainz into, potentially, the internet’s greatest repository for event art. Once again supporting multiple formats (jpg, gif, png, htm, html, jpe, jfif, pdf) in any resolution/size, now all that is needed is for music lovers and archivists to add event art. Since the feature has been in beta we have already had 700+ beautiful (and attractively ugly) pieces of event art added. Browse all the event art edits (EAA statistics/timeline).

What are you waiting for? Start adding your event posters (adding the event first), scanned or digital! And not just posters. The Event Art Archive already supports the following types:

• Poster
• Ticket
• Setlist
• Schedule
• Banner
• Flyer
• Map
• Merchandise

Check the Event Art Types documentation if you are unsure what to use, and remember to assign all the types that apply to each picture. There is new documentation and video tutorials available for adding event art (documentation/video) as well as adding events (documentation/video).

It is particularly exciting for us to be able to support event ephemera, and we can’t wait to see what interesting objects get added. Ticket stubs, tour shirts, guitar picks, setlists… some events are already packed with interesting imagery. No doubt the taggers of MusicBrainz, who have already given us much joy via tags like ‘sillyname’, will come up with interesting ways to categorize and explore event art. We’ve kicked off a ‘cool poster’ tag – if you come up with another good (or ridiculous) poster theme, genre, or style tag, make sure to comment here and leave a link.

If you spot EAA bugs, improvements to be made, or a missing image type that you need, first have a search in the MetaBrainz ticket tracker and see if there is a fix already on the stove. If not, please make a new ticket. If you’re not sure how to do so, a pro tip is to find and copy a similar ticket. Those with ticket allergies are also welcome to leave a comment, with details, on this post.

Events are a MusicBrainz feature that has long been simmering, waiting to take off. As with any large-scale database, we can face what is known as the ‘cold start’ problem, or perhaps the ‘chicken and egg’ problem. That is, we don’t yet have the event coverage to attract new users, which means we don’t have new users submitting new events and increasing our coverage. Nonetheless, MusicBrainz has amassed 82,043 events since 2015 (event timeline). We expect this to get a huge boost from the addition of the Event Art Archive, which makes MusicBrainz events a more appealing option for music fans, archivists, and third party developers. Some developers are already dabbling with event data (Festival Guide Android app) and in the future™ we expect to incorporate events into our very own ListenBrainz. Our goal is to expand the global music community’s access to high-quality and open source event data, and this is a big step.

Thank you to all the MetaBrainz developers (particularly bitmap!), community contributors, and the Internet Archive, for making the Event Art Archive possible.