Remembering mayhem

Rob Kaye (also known to the community and his peers as ruaok and mayhem) was many things. Friend, partner, colleague, ‘that guy with the crazy hair’, hacker, burner, visionary and much more. And always a source of creative mayhem!

Millions more have used, contributed to, or benefited from his open-source vision and projects. There’s no doubt that Rob was one of the spearheads of open-source. He championed open music data and showed the world that a non-profit open-source organisation could be financially viable, competing with (and far outliving most) similar corporate projects.

Below we will share some of Rob’s history with MetaBrainz and staff. Thank you to everyone who left memories on the announcement post and elsewhere on the world wide web. His spirit lives on in our hearts and in 1’s and 0’s.

Rob and MetaBrainz

In the year 2000 a young Rob created MusicBrainz. He had just witnessed the corporatization of CDDB and embarked on the creation of a collaborative music database that could never be snatched from its contributors.

For over 25 years Rob guided MusicBrainz along its path, always focussed on his vision of openness and independence. He nestled his projects safely the non-profit arms of the MetaBrainz Foundation, to further safeguard them for the future. Since the year 2000 many of MusicBrainz’ sister projects have bloomed under the MetaBrainz umbrella, such as MusicBrainz Picard, BookBrainz and ListenBrainz, with Rob either supporting community efforts or identifying a need and kickstarting them himself.

26 years after founding MusicBrainz, with 143,901,298 and growing MusicBrainz IDs serving billions of global requests and (relatively) young ListenBrainz already at 1 billion+ listens, there is no doubt that Rob’s open-source efforts have changed the landscape of music data and, by extension, human culture (which relies on open and accessible histories) and the lives of musicians. It’s changed not just for us die-hards who live “in” the MetaBrainz ecosystem, but also for the millions of people using the thousands of services that interact with MetaBrainz’ data. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that most people have interacted with MetaBrainz data at some point in their lives.

None of this could have happened without Rob’s fierce and immovable guard against corporate influence and the enshittification that has taken down so many of MetaBrainz’ contemporaries over the decades. He would gleefully share stories of offers to “purchase” MetaBrainz and the ignorance of trying to spend money on something that has effectively been made utterly un-purchasable. He did not bend the knee to power – exemplified by his famous ‘Amazon cake’ endeavour.

Rob was a hacker at heart which made it all the more admirable that he spent much of his time dealing with the humdrum of what has become a substantial operation with a respectable row of servers and employees, all clamouring to be kept warm, dry, fed and paid, not to mention guiding 100’s of students and new contributors through their first forays into open-source.

Robert Kaye and some of the MetaBrainz team in 2024

Rob was also an excellent delegator. Once you had Rob’s trust he would let you cook, resulting in a wide range of incredible talent being incorporated into the MetaBrainz team. Rob was still coding whenever he could, but his excellent team allowed him to spend the free time that MetaBrainz’ admin left him hacking on collaborations, experiments and anything else that caught his interest – for instance, recently he was spending some evenings working on MBID Mapper 2.0, looking forward to GSoC, and was excited about upcoming collaborations.

Rob will be outlived by what he built, just as he intended. Nothing will be able to replace the presence of that cheeky smile, but Rob’s influence will still be felt when the monument to many a king would have crumbled.

The Captain and My Friend

zas has written the following piece about his experience working with Rob, an experience everyone on the MetaBrainz staff, board, and many many volunteer contributors were lucky enough to share.

Rob and I were both born in 1970. Being children of that same year meant we shared more than just a birth year; we shared a digital soul. We grew up hacking hardware when it still felt like magic, watching the world connect through the screech of modems, and finding our first real homes in the scrolling text of IRC and newsgroups.

Rob was a man of many origins—German, American, Catalan, and a constant traveller. But he didn’t just move through the world; he transformed it. He was impossible to miss: a man of flashy colours, vibrant hair, and weird clothes. Even in the crowded ancient streets of the Old Delhi Market, Rob stood out. He occupied space with a joyous, colourful defiance that invited everyone else to be themselves, too.

I first came to the project through a specific challenge. I had 2k+ CDs from my collection converted into FLAC files and a question: how to properly tag them with decent metadata? I met MusicBrainz, then Picard, and eventually, I met Rob and a life-changing friendship of 12 years. One day, he messaged me with a simple question: would I be interested in some sysadmin tasks?

I jumped on a train to Barcelona just to see him. We sat in a bar, drank a beer, and—despite my “very bad” spoken English—we understood each other perfectly. We spent that afternoon dreaming up ways to migrate the entire MusicBrainz infrastructure.

Rob had a rare duality. He was the flamboyant traveller and maker who could command a room in a custom-made skirt of his own design, yet he was also the close friend who would happily retreat into a quiet corner to lose himself in the details of a PCB design or a complex server migration. He was as comfortable under the spotlight as he was behind a terminal. He was loving machines AND humans.

He built a “glass house” of data so that the fruits of our labor could never be sold or stolen. He was a leader who never lost the soul of a hacker, a visionary who lived and dressed in technicolor.

Rob was the Captain of MetaBrainz, but to me, he was a fellow traveller who started his journey exactly when I did. He has moved on to the next adventure, leaving us a world that is a little more open, a lot more honest, and infinitely more colourful.

The servers are up, the mission continues, and the music is playing for you, Rob.

Rest easy, my friend. Ruhe in Frieden. Reposa en pau. Bon voyage.

Gallery of mayhem