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.

The MetaBrainz Foundation is seeking a new Executive Director (ED)

This is a copy of the job description at:
https://join.com/companies/metabrainzorg/15986127-executive-director
Please use the above link to apply.

The MetaBrainz Foundation is seeking a new Executive Director (ED) to lead it during a time of great change for how music, data, and code are made, shared and used.

The MetaBrainz Foundation is a non-profit that provides free, open access to data. It is the steward of open source databases and software, including MusicBrainz (a community-maintained open source music metadata encyclopedia that supplies infrastructure to many of the world’s most-used music products and services), and Picard (an open source software application for identifying, tagging, and organizing digital audio recordings). MetaBrainz is supported by its community, sponsors, and by the commercial organizations who rely on what it does.

In collaboration with the Foundation’s Board of Directors, the ED is ultimately responsible for delivering the MetaBrainz mission, guaranteeing the organization’s top priority: the good health of its community. The ED is also in charge of maintaining excellent relationships with industrial partners. Ultimately, you will ensure that MetaBrainz operates with integrity, efficiency and transparency, that it remains in financial good health, and that its small in-house team of developers is supported and managed with sensitivity and professionalism.

Our new ED will be based in Europe. The role involves some travel, as well as virtual meetings in Europe, Asia and the Americas. They will be someone of integrity and good judgement, ideally someone with stature in either the open source or music communities. They will understand the ethical and regulatory requirements of NPOs. They’ll understand the history & mechanics of recorded music and be open to the possibilities and threats from a very rapidly changing technical, commercial and artistic world beyond music.

Tasks

The ED’s primary responsibility is to ensure MetaBrainz fulfils its mission with integrity, transparency, and respect for its community. They will:

Work to keep the MetaBrainz community healthy: welcoming, fair, and constructive.
Represent MetaBrainz, to its community, the public, and the industries it supports, ensuring the Foundation’s strategy and operational activities are communicated appropriately.
Work with the Board to build the Foundation’s strategy and the operational plan to realize it, including budget setting and management, ensuring the organization remains financially stable.
Oversee agreements with commercial partners and suppliers.
Make sure MetaBrainz meets its nonprofit and data-related legal obligations across jurisdictions.
Preempt emerging regulatory and industry changes that could affect the MetaBrainz mission.
Maintain strong, trust-based relationships with current commercial users and sponsors.
Grow relationships with current and prospective partners, encouraging them to support the ecosystem they rely on.
Support and manage the in-house team.

Requirements

Ideally the incoming ED will have:

An excellent understanding of the international music industry.
Experience maintaining healthy, vibrant online communities.
Open source project governance experience.
Knowledge of international copyright frameworks and the commercial framework for music.
Fluency in English (Spanish and other languages a plus).
Experience managing physical and digital events such as community meet-ups, summits, and development intensives.
Knowledge of local and international regulatory frameworks for non-profit organizations.
Experience managing complex software development projects.

C4GT 2025: Integrate Internet Archive Into BrainzPlayer

Hey Everyone 👋!

I am Rayyan Seliya (AKA rayyan_seliya123 on IRC and RayyanSeliya on GitHub), a prefinal year student at Indian Institute of Information Technology Agartala, India, studying Computer Science. I was thrilled to be selected as a contributor in the C4GT (Code For Govt Tech) 2025 program under the MetaBrainz Foundation. My project focused on integrating music streaming from Internet Archive into BrainzPlayer. It was mentored by Kartik Ohri (lucifer on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC).

Project Overview

ListenBrainz has a number of music discovery features that use BrainzPlayer to facilitate track playback. BrainzPlayer (BP) is a custom React component in ListenBrainz that uses multiple data sources to search and play a track. As of now, it supports Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and Funkwhale as music services. It would be useful for BrainzPlayer to support the Internet Archive, which hosts a vast collection of digitized recordings from physical releases of the early 20th century, including 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings. Each recording comes with audio streaming and metadata web services that can be used to retrieve metadata automatically and embed a player in ListenBrainz using BrainzPlayer.

We can’t have nice things… because of AI scrapers

In the past few months the MetaBrainz team has been fighting a battle against unscrupulous AI companies ignoring common courtesies (such as robots.txt) and scraping the Internet in order to build up their AI models. Rather than downloading our dataset in one complete download, they insist on loading all of MusicBrainz one page at a time. This of course would take hundreds of years to complete and is utterly pointless. In doing so, they are overloading our servers and preventing legitimate users from accessing our site.

Now the AI scrapers have found ListenBrainz and are hitting a number of our API endpoints for their nefarious data gathering purposes. In order to protect our services from becoming overloaded, we’ve made the following changes:

The /metadata/lookup API endpoints (GET and POST versions) now require the caller to send an Authorization token in order for this endpoint to work.
The ListenBrainz Labs API endpoints for mbid-mapping, mbid-mapping-release and mbid-mapping-explain have been removed. Those were always intended for debugging purposes and will also soon be replaced with a new endpoints for our upcoming improved mapper.
LB Radio will now require users to be logged in to use it (and API endpoint users will need to send the Authorization header). The error message for logged in users is a bit clunky at the moment; we’ll fix this once we’ve finished the work for this year’s Year in Music.

Sorry for these hassles and no-notice changes, but they were required in order to keep our services functioning at an acceptable level.

GSoC 2025: Onboarding Revamp in ListenBrainz Android

Hi everyone,

I’m Hemang Mishra (hemang-mishra on IRC and hemang-mishra on GitHub). I’m currently a pre-final year student at IIIT Jabalpur, India. This summer, I had the opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code with MetaBrainz. My mentor for the program was Jasjeet Singh (jasje on IRC).

I contributed to ListenBrainz Android, where I worked on revamping the onboarding experience, improving login, adding listen submission apps, integrating Listening Now, and setting up app updates. The journey has been both exciting and full of learning, and I’m truly grateful for this opportunity.

Project Overview

ListenBrainz is a powerful platform that helps track listening history, share music tastes, and build a community around music.

The main goals of my project were:

Revamping onboarding – introducing users to the app’s core features and handling permissions with clear rationale.
Improving login –replacing simple web pages with a custom Compose-based UI, and experimenting with the DOM tree of the web page to automate form submissions and token extraction in the background.
Listen submission apps – prompting users during onboarding to select which apps to collect listens from, preventing unwanted submissions.
Listening Now integration – adding “Listening Now” into BrainzPlayer.
App updates – enabling updates for both Play Store and non-Play Store (F-Droid or sideloaded) releases.

GSoC 2025: MetaBrainz Notification System

Hello, my name is Shaik Junaid (IRC nick fettuccinae and fettuccinae on GitHub). I’m an undergrad computer science student from MGIT, Hyderabad, India. My project focused on adding a central notification system for MetaBrainz.

Project Overview

This project’s idea was suggested to me by mentor @ruaok (AKA mayhem on IRC). I submitted my proposal on the MetaBrainz Forum and got it reviewed by @kartikohri13 (AKA lucifer on IRC), and finally got selected for GSoC 2025 .

A centralized notification management system will various MetaBrainz projects send notifications to users without rewriting boilerplate code. It will also keep users informed about the latest events and new features across projects. This is a goal bigger than the scope of a single GSoC project. To keep it reasonable, my project focused on implementing REST APIs, hosted on metabrainz.org, to manage notifications and user preferences for notifications. Additionally, I integrated the system with ListenBrainz to demonstrate its functionality.

The project spec sheet can be found here.