We’re shaking with excitement! Flipping with energy! Anaglyphing with… something. These are just some of the username effects (flair) you can now show off if you are a ListenBrainz donor:
Static effects, animations and mouseover animations, all are unlocked for a month when you donate $5. Paying more will stack further months of flair.
Check out the different effects in your settings page, and then head to the donation page to unlock them and help us pay for our server costs and keep all that lovely data flowing. If you can’t afford this cost, don’t worry! Your presence is always enough. Thank you for being part of this project and this community.
We will be monitoring how everything looks and taking on your feedback. We don’t expect your ListenBrainz interface to start exploding with animation and movement – if so many people start donating that it gets overwhelming then that will be a problem that we will be very happy to address!
Don’t worry, we are not planning on paywalling any features, this is a just a fun way of thanking our lovely supporters.
Why have we spent some time on showcasing user donations? A data intensive project like ListenBrainz uses a lot of processing power – more than you might think. Processing power isn’t free. And we want to deliver more, better and quicker statistics, which means more processors, more machines, more hard drives! Sometimes the devs also insist on being fed, but the servers come first.
But before we even think about increasing the ListenBrainz server capacity we need to look at covering the base costs. As it stands ListenBrainz is essentially funded by MusicBrainz. We would like to make ListenBrainz more financially independent, and user donations are a step towards bringing this little tyke out from its mother’s wing. It is not the only step, as the ListenBrainz database grows we expect to gain more commercial supporters, meaning developers and organisations that use our ListenBrainz data dumps for commercial projects and support the foundation financially in return.
But an interesting (assuming you’re not asleep already) aspect of all this is that we are a 501(c)(3) non-profit, registered in the USA. The regulatory people there start to raise their eyebrows when the bulk of a non profit’s financial support comes from organisations or businesses who are paying for data access, rather than lots of individuals. They start to suspect that MetaBrainz is just a business (boo!), not a giga-church (yay!) fleecing thousands of followers. Having a reasonable amount of individual user donations on the books reassures them that we are indeed doing our best to convert masses of unwashed heathens to the MetaChurch.