aerozol – MetaBrainz Blog

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.

Updates to Audiobooks, Audio Dramas, Broadcasts and Podcasts

If you are a fan of words going into your ears, please fasten your seatbelt. We have a number of exciting updates for podcasts, broadcasts, audiobooks and audio dramas, including new relationships and updated guidelines!

Explore Your Year in Music 2024

ListenBrainz is back with your #yearinmusic (YIM) reports for 2024!

Log in to ListenBrainz (LB) and click here to see your report, or here if you don’t have an account and want to see what the fuss is all about.

Missed out and want a YIM? Sign up for a ListenBrainz account, connect your services or your player, and get listening. We’ll have you sorted for 2025. If you are a last.fm user with existing listens you’re in luck – connect your last.fm account to ListenBrainz now, which will also import your listening history, and we will (re)generate you a 2024 YIM in a couple of weeks time.

ListenBrainz donor flairs

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.