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!

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.

GSoC 2026: Compose Multiplatform Migration of ListenBrainz-Android

Hi everyone,

I’m Nirvan Jain (nirvan_jain on IRC, nirvan73 on GitHub), I’m currently a pre-final year student at IIIT Jabalpur. This summer I was offered this opportunity to work with MetaBrainz through Google Summer of Code on migrating the ListenBrainz android app to Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, so that most of the same codebase can eventually run on iOS under the mentorship of Jasjeet Singh (jasje on IRC).

This post covers what the project was, everything I worked on, the parts that went wrong, what’s still left, and what the summer was actually like.

How I got here

I started contributing to ListenBrainz in December 2025. It was the first external open source project I’d worked on. Everything before that was coursework, side projects, or intra-college events.

My first PRs were small work which helped me a lot to understand the codebase from the ground, the shimmer effect across the Feed and Profile tabs, then extending search to cover playlists, artists, albums and tracks, plus some bug fixes. Small changes, but they taught me the codebase and how review works when nobody knows you and the code has to stand on its own.

I picked ListenBrainz because music is a constant in my day, whether I’m coding or not, and because I like that it treats your listening history as something you own.

The Problem

ListenBrainz has an Android app but no iOS version. A previous Swift attempt just duplicated the codebase, so every bug fix had to be written twice.

This project solves that by migrating to Kotlin Multiplatform, one shared codebase for both platforms. A large part of the work is replacing Android-only libraries with multiplatform equivalents across navigation, dependency injection and paging. Media playback is the harder case. ExoPlayer and WorkManager are tied too closely to Android to share, so both go behind common interfaces, with ExoPlayer on Android and AVPlayer on iOS underneath.

Getting this foundation right is what makes the rest cheap. Once it’s in place a feature or a bug fix is written once, instead of the same business logic being implemented twice and two apps being kept in sync by hand.

One thing genuinely can’t move. The notification listener that reads what’s playing in Spotify depends on an Android-only permission, and iOS has no equivalent to offer. Those screens stay Android-only. Everything else runs from one codebase on both platforms.

Growing pains: An update on the ListenBrainz service status

TL;DR: The growth of ListenBrainz has caught up with us, and our limited team is working on replacing central parts of our infrastructure. In the meantime, many features are unstable.

We are victims of our success. While in the long term this is a good problem to have, the sharp increase in users over the past year and a half has left our infrastructure cracking at the seams.

The good news: Your listens are being stored and imported without issue, even if there are delays. The core service is not compromised and we ask that you please keep submitting your listens. Your stats and playlists will be back!

However, we know that every other week your statistics, weekly playlists, and other features fail to generate for everyone, and cause crashes. We know it is frustrating, and we share that feeling.

While we are aware of the issues, fixing them is far from simple and requires us to completely rework all the crucial parts of our infrastructure.

In the interest of transparency, here are our main issues and what we are doing to fix them:

Spotify users will need to reconnect every 6 months to ListenBrainz

Spotify recently announced a drastic change in their API: connections to your account will now expire after 6 months, starting July 20th.

If you have your Spotify account connected to ListenBrainz, this means you will have to reconnect your Spotify account every 6 months, or ListenBrainz will not be able to keep your listening history in sync.
To get us started, all users will need to reconnect their Spotify account this coming Monday July 20th.

In addition to sending you an email, you will see an error message at the top of the page in ListenBrainz:

To minimize disruption and potential loss of listening history in the future, we will send you an email a month ahead, and one week ahead of the disconnection for you to disconnect and reconnect your Spotify account in your music services settings.

This is quite the thorn in our side but alas we have no other choice as the internet continues to enshittify.

Current ListenBrainz server issues/high load, Part 2

This follow-up post covers how and why our servers are still being impacted, an explanation and examples of what we consider “botting” in ListenBrainz – and an apology, because our last post had some baaad comms!

Firstly, we are still experiencing massive server load from an increase in listen submissions related to the BTS fan exodus from last.fm (not all bad! more on this below) – and we are now being hit by another influx of AI scrapers.

Our apologies to our users, new and old, as we continue to work to mitigate the extra load. Remain assured that listens are not being lost – our processing queue is lagging behind, so listens may take (up to) hours to appear.

LB radio and the popularity endpoints have been temporarily disabled, to reduce server load.

Current ListenBrainz server issues/high load

Our apologies if you are experiencing outages or slowness on ListenBrainz currently. First it was AI scrapers, now it’s K-pop fans…

In short, we are experiencing massive server load from an unexpected and massive increase in listen submissions. Please bear with us as the small (but mighty) ListenBrainz team works on possible mitigations.

None of your listens are being lost, they are all sitting safely in our (massively overloaded) processing queue:

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).

Downtime for PostgreSQL / MusicBrainz schema change upgrade: Monday, May 11, 15:00 UTC

On Monday, May 11, at 15:00 UTC (8am PT, 11am ET, 5:00pm CEST), we’ll be:

Upgrading our production database server to PostgreSQL v18.
Performing the MusicBrainz schema version 31 upgrade.

See the previous announcement for more information.

We’ll be working to restore services as quickly as possible, but expect MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, and BookBrainz to be down for the hour. Thanks in advance for your patience!

Afterward, we’ll post instructions on the blog about how to upgrade your MusicBrainz mirror server.