aerozol – MetaBrainz Blog

Happening NOW: AMA with Silona Bonewald, MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director

Silona Bonewald, our new Executive Director, is NOW hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in this forum thread.

Please respect the code of conduct, as you always do!

You are welcome to post questions in the thread later, and Silona will do her best to answer them when she has the time. We will close the thread after a couple of days – though of course the door remains open to chat with the MetaBrainz team any time in the future!

You can find more information about Silona on our Executive Director announcement post.

Our editors: vzell

This is part of a series where we talk to some of the amazing editors that have cracked one million MusicBrainz edits and qualified for super special (lousy) shirt plan.*

These users have donated substantial amounts of their time to improve open music data, enriching open-source knowledge and culture for billions of people. Let’s find out what makes vzell click. And click and click and click!

Save the date: AMA with Silona Bonewald, MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director

Silona Bonewald, our new Executive Director, will be hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on our forums at:

5th October 2026
17:00 Central European Summer Time (CEST)
In this forum thread

Please respect the code of conduct, as you always do!

We are aware that this time will not suit everyone’s timezone, so we will open the thread a day or so before the AMA, for early questions. We will also leave the thread open for a couple of days – but don’t wait too long!

You can find more information about Silona on our Executive Director announcement post.

Welcome Silona Bonewald, new MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director!

We are very pleased to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has appointed Silona Bonewald as Executive Director, following the unfortunate passing of our Rob at the beginning of the year.

Silona has served as Executive Director of IEEE SA Open and Vice President of Community Architecture at Hyperledger, part of the Linux Foundation. Earlier in her career she served as Director of InnerSource at PayPal and authored the widely used O’Reilly publication Understanding the InnerSource Checklist.

Silona also founded the League of Technical Voters, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to government transparency through open source technology, and has since advised nonprofit and open source organizations including the Cardano community’s IntersectMBO, the Foundation for Public Code, and the Software Freedom Conservancy. She has served on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Austin chapter in the past and holds standing relationships across the world wide standards communities, and more… If you would like to keep browsing Silona’s looong list of professional credentials you are welcome to follow her on LinkedIn.

That’s all a long way to say that we are very excited to have Silona on board! The team is looking forward to working with Silona and you (our wonderful community) to carry Rob’s legacy forward.

Please give Silona a warm welcome in the comments!

Silona will also be hosting an AMA on 5 October 2026, at 17:00 UTC, on the forums (we will do another announcement regarding this, closer to the time), where you can post questions and share with Silona some of your dreams for the future of the MetaBrainz Foundation and its projects!

The super special (lousy) shirt plan

Editors are by far MetaBrainz’ biggest and most irreplaceable resource.

They (you) spend countless hours entering data for free, be it for the love of music, to tidy their own collections and listen histories, to support their scenes, to archive historical and cultural data, to apply the cool and soothing editing brain-balm, or a combination of all of the above and more.

Some of the top editors have provided the backbone of MusicBrainz for years, decades, and often perform the more tedious data maintenance and checking tasks.

A few summits ago, the question was asked – can we give these editors, say those with 1 million+ edits, some recognition without getting into the quagmire of things like gamifying?

Enter super special (lousy) shirt plan.

reo showcasing his super special lousy shirt – a *real* and rare image of a top MusicBrainz editor **outside**!?

Blocked ListenBrainz services/User Agent strings

Unfortunately some legitimate services got caught up in our recent attempts to mitigate (yet another) bot-net attack on ListenBrainz.

You may find that a service you use is now being blocked, including Navidrome. We have also had reports of multi-scrobbler submissions being blocked, and there may be other affected services that haven’t yet been reported to us.

These services got caught up in recent blocks because they are/were not setting a proper user agent when calling the LB API.

Navidrome and multi-scrobbler are already pushing fixes!

If you are experiencing issues on another service, we would like to let you through, but without a user agent (UA) string we can’t identify the service’s traffic. Please ask your service to add a meaningful UA string (in a format like described in https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_API/Rate_Limiting) so we can get you back up and running.

Phishing attempts using MetaBrainz messages

There have been reports of users receiving phishing messages via the MetaBrainz messaging service.

Remember: MetaBrainz staff will never ask for your password. MetaBrainz staff will never ask you to log in to a third-party site (or ‘verify’ your username and password in any other way).

MerchBrainz

We have added a range of great new MetaBrainz designs to our merch store: https://www.redbubble.com/people/metabrainz/shop

These designs by Monkey, previously only available to MetaBrainz summit attendees, have been lightly modified (summit-specific text removed) for everyday wear. Are many people going to know what you’re repping? No. Are the ones that do going to go “DAAAAAAAAAAAAMN IT’S THE BRAINZ YO”? Most definitely!

Year in Music 2025 – new and improved!

#YearinMusic 2025 is out now!

A bit like Spotify’s Wrapped (but way super better, in my extremely biased opinion) your ListenBrainz Year in Music report summarizes your listening habits from throughout the year 2025… and now, back through time!

Read more after the jump, or just check it for real real by clicking here to see your report or here if you don’t have an account.

You are invited to MetaBrainz Summit 25

MetaBrainz Summit 25 is upon us! September 15-19 in Barcelona, Spain.

We would love for you to join us remotely. If you are reading this, you are qualified to attend. Congratulations! Read on for more information.