Category: General

We’re working to add a paid option to our Web Service for commercial users and for end users who would like to have faster access. We’re finally getting close to being able to offer this service and we would like to get some feedback from our users about this.

We are proposing to add “no waiting” access to our web service — this proposed service would:

1. Allow continuous sequential access to our version 2 web service without delays between calls. You would not be required to have any delays between calls to the web service (our current service requires a 1 second delay between calls)
2. Still have a global rate limit that may temporarily deny callers access to our web service (with 503 responses) if our service gets overloaded. We would work hard to ensure that our service would not reach this limit, since its a paid service, but we cannot guarantee that.
3. Not allow concurrent (more than one call at a time) calls to our web service per user. We reserve the right to terminate your service if we find that you are making concurrent calls to our “no waiting” service.

Our existing web service will not be affected by this new service — the existing service will remain free and limited to one request per second as it is now. Initially the new service is intended for end-users who wish to have faster access to our web service. Once we’ve ironed out the kinks in this new service we will offer this service for commercial customers as well.

Finally, we’ve set up a very short survey (3 questions only!) to gather some feedback from you about this service. We’re mainly trying to establish a reasonable price for this service. Please take our survey and let us know what you think and how much you’d pay for our service.

All of your responses will be private and the survey does not ask for any information about you. Thanks, we appreciate your thoughts!

Earlier this week I met with Shawn Simister, who works on Google’s Freebase project (former from MetaWeb) to touch base about how MusicBrainz is being utilized inside of Google. MusicBrainz represents a large chunk of the music data in Freebase and in turn the Freebase data is used as one of the sources of data for Google’s search.

Shawn explains this in more detail:

You can actually see a couple areas where we’re using the Freebase music data publicly. First, in the structured refinements in search. If you search for lady gaga albums and scroll to the bottom to see “Album searches for Lady Gaga”. Also you can see videos clustered by topic in YouTube Topics and many of the topics are music-related.

It’s important to keep in mind that Musicbrainz is just part of the solution. It’s a pretty big part of Freebase music data and therefore its likely to be a pretty big component in these results but as you know the search results team at Google is pretty secretive about what all goes into the results page so even I can’t tell for certain when they’re using Freebase/Musicbrainz data for any given result.

I think it’s important that people don’t mistake this as a one-to-one relationship between Musicbrainz data and Google results because there are quite a few steps in between but there’s definitely a strong connection there and we really appreciate everything that the Musicbrainz community is doing and hope that Musicbrainz community continues to grow.

I find this tremendously exciting to hear, since I proposed a very similar thing to Google many years ago. While this idea was rejected back in the day, I’m excited to see that Google is now using our data for it searches. Every person who has ever contributed to MusicBrainz should be proud!

Thank you to everyone and thank you Shawn for shedding some light on this!