Category: Community

Jess Hemerly, who is has been studying MusicBrainz as part of a class at UC Berkeley, has devised a survey for MusicBrainz users to get a better understanding of who contributes to MusicBrainz and why. She says:

I’m a researcher at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a MusicBrainz editor (agreatnotion). I’m interested in how and why people contribute to MusicBrainz and how it can be better. Your participation will help us learn more about you, our community, and how to sustain a successful peer-produced database. The survey takes about 15 minutes, and all personal information—like username and email—will remain confidential. My advisor and I will review and analyze the results and hope to share our analysis with the academic and open source communities. The results will also be made available to the MusicBrainz community.

Take the survey here. The survey will be open for two weeks, until July 23, 2010.

Thank you for participating!

The kind folks at GigJunkie (thanks Marc and Oliver!) have sorted us a place to meet up on wednesday night:

Southwark Rooms at 60 Southwark Street, SE1. The nearest tube stop is London Bridge. We’re going meet there starting at 6pm on Wednesday 16 June.

Hope to see you there!

I will be in London again soon and its been a while since we’ve gathered to have a pint. If you’re in or near London and feel like meeting up with other Brainerz, please keep the evening of June 16th open.

If anyone has any suggestions for a pub that is reasonably central, but not overly noisy, please make a comment in this blog post.

Thanks, and I look forward to seeing you!

For many years I’ve espoused MusicBrainz should collect enough information that would allow us to track connections between disparate artists through a game of six degrees of separation. And now Paul Lamere from the EchoNest has done exactly this for Music Hack Day San Francisco.

Six degrees of Black Sabbath allows you to enter two artists and it will search the MusicBrainz advanced relationships to find a connection between your two artists. See Paul’s blog post for more details.

Very very cool to see interesting applications like this appear in the MusicBrainz ecosystem!

Thanks Paul!

During the last summit we spoke about listing concerts on MusicBrainz artist pages. So far we’ve had three concert listing providers approach us about listing concerts on our artist pages.

I generally hate the idea of advertising and I find the idea of advertising on MusicBrainz as very distasteful. But, being alerted to a concert in your area while browsing MusicBrainz seems like a very valuable addition to our site, especially if people are willing to provide the data for us for free!

So, I have two questions for the general MusicBrainz community:

1. How do you feel about concert listings on MusicBrainz?
2. Should we make the concert data providers pay for us showing their concert information? Since three companies have already approached us, it seems that we have leeway to ask for payment for this service. (This then would allow us to pay for some of the programmers who slave over making MB better for everyone).

Regardless of payment or not, we would rotate providers while showing listings to give every provider a fair number of impressions for their concert listings.

Please post your comments below!

LyricWiki and MusicBrainz are two community-powered sites about music which share some of the same passionate users. LyricWiki contains song lyrics and MusicBrainz contains metadata (detailed info) about music.

As of today, the two projects are going to be able to work together better than ever. Now that LyricWiki has obtained licensing, MusicBrainz can now link to song lyrics without worrying about legal issues. LyricWiki has given explicit permission to MusicBrainz to do so and MusicBrainz has added LyricWiki links (as an AR type) to their standard.

Linking from LyricWiki to MusicBrainz

To link to an artist, track, or release on MusicBrainz, put “musicbrainz= [UUID]” into the footer (ArtistFooter, AlbumFooter, or SongFooter) template. For [UUID], put in the MusicBrainzIdentifier. This has been available for quite a while, but hopefully there will be many more links now that we’re working more closely.

Linking from MusicBrainz to LyricWiki

To link a release or a track to LyricWiki, copy the LyricWiki album or track URL and then navigate to the proper release or track page in MusicBrainz. Be sure to be logged in and then click on “Relate to URL” link. Follow the instructions on the next page to add the LyricWiki URL to MusicBrainz.

This is an exciting opportunity for the two projects to be more closely linked together. We’re looking forward to it!

– Sean Colombo & Robert Kaye

Navap undertook a re-write of our privacy policy page to make the page more consistent and better organized. However, the actual policy did not change — just the wording/formatting of the page has changed.

Please take a look at the diff of the changes and the new page.

(This post is mostly only for full disclosure — seeing Facebook being shredded for its new policy is making me overly cautious right now.)