Category: MetaBrainz

The MetaBrainz PayPal account has become a testing ground for people to test stolen credit cards. We were constantly getting tons of donations (dozens per DAY!) of tiny donations at first. Then they turned to $1 donations. And now they are $30-$40 per piece. And each and every one of these gets challenged and the money turned back over to PayPal. In the process I get about 3-5 emails in total about for each of these donations. Plus it clutters our books with tons of useless entries that make oversight of the books a real pain. I’m really sick of this!

Google offers their checkout services and even offers special deals for non-profits — I would very much like to switch over to Google Checkout. Can you think of any reason to not dump PayPal and go with Google Checkout?

I’m pleased to announce that MetaWeb has signed our live data-feed contract and is now a customer of MetaBrainz and thus a supporter of MusicBrainz!

MetaWeb operates FreeBase, the open, shared database of the world’s knowledge. MetaWeb will be using the MusicBrainz live data-feed to add music metadata to FreeBase. Previously, MetaWeb contributed to the MusicBrainz by sending Chis Maden to the MusicBrainz Summit #8.

Thanks for all the support MetaWeb! Big thanks go to Robert Cook, Paul Davison, Chris Maden, Tomi Pierce and Patrick Tufts (the latter two have moved on from MetaWeb, but were instrumental in getting MusicBrainz support in FreeBase).

Our director John Buckman of Magnatune has recently stepped down from the board of directors of the MetaBrainz Foundation due to an overwhelming number of other responsibilities. Derek Sivers, the founder and lead geek behind CD Baby joined the board of directors today to replace John.

Thanks to John for all of your efforts in supporting MusicBrainz/MetaBrainz and thanks to Derek for joining us. I’m looking forward to working with you!

I’m very proud to announce that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has teamed up with MusicBrainz!

The BBC has taken a license to our live data feed and has augmented their music web pages with MusicBrainz data. The new and improved web pages show a complete discography for the artist and a collection of AR links that give BBC listeners more context about the music that the BBC broadcasts. For example, see this improved White Stripes artist page on the BBC pages and compare the links found there to the links we have for the White Stripes.

In exchange, MusicBrainz receives a monthly license fee that will allow MetaBrainz to hire some engineering help in the coming months to work on new features and to improve the existing infrastructure. This is quite significant since MusicBrainz has been resource constrained for many months now — having paid people on staff will ensure a more reasonable amount of progress moving forward.

Even cooler, the BBC online music editors will soon participate in the MusicBrainz community contributing their knowledge to MusicBrainz. The goal is to have the BBC /music editorial team round out and add new information to MusicBrainz as they need to use it in their MusicBrainz enabled applications internally.

This represents a gigantic step for MusicBrainz! First, it gives MusicBrainz a significant vote of confidence from a large and respected organization. Second, it brings in a team of music experts that will participate in MusicBrainz. For the most part, MusicBrainz has been maintained by music enthusiasts and not by music experts. It will be an interesting journey for us to welcome the BBC team and see how they can participate in our community.

If you’d like to learn about about the /music team participating in MusicBrainz, take a look at theBBCTeamsEditingMusicBrainz wiki page — we’ll endeavor to keep this page up to date with information regarding out partnership. Also, you may be interested to take a look at the press release that we’ve issued today.

The number of people who worked hard to make this happen inside the BBC is very long, so I won’t go and thank every person (I’ve not even met them all!). But I must thank Micheal Smethurst, Stephen Butler, Matthew Wood, Amy Taylor and Tom Scott for their diligence, persistence and vision for getting this deal done. Its been a long three years since I first made contact with the BBC, but good things come to those who wait, right?

I’m proud to announce that Rachel Segal has just been voted to take the Treasurer/Secretary slot on the MetaBrainz Board of Directors. Rachel is the Marketing and Artist Relations manager for MusicIP and is already quite familiar with MusicBrainz and the MetaBrainz Foundation.

Rachel Segal will be taking over the duties of the outgoing secretary/treasurer Rachel Soffa. Rachel Soffa has recently landed a big promotion which will make her life even more busy than before, thus necessitating this change.

Thank you very much Rachel Soffa and congratulations on your promotion! Thank you to Rachel Segal for joining our organization and helping out with our operations!

I just returned from SXSW in Austin where I had the chance to speak to many people about MusicBrainz, see a few dozen bands and attend many music parties where I talked more about MusicBrainz. This trip was a great opportunity to catch up with a number of people and to forge new relationships for MusicBrainz.

This would not have happened if it wasn’t for Cliff and his cool team at Rightround/BandBot donating a free Music conference badge to me! And MusicIP rose to the challenge and found and paid for a hotel room so I could avoid sleeping on people’s hotel rooms floors!

Thanks Rightround and MusicIP — thanks for making my trip to SXSW possible and awesome!

Back in December I posted about donations to MusicBrainz and a number of people requested a way to do direct bank transfers. Unfortunately our bank wasn’t well set up for this purpose and I began seeking a new bank that could help us accept direct bank transfers without having to pay huge amounts of fees. I’m pleased to announce that we are in the process of switching all of our banking over to Washington Mutual (WaMu)! WaMu has very kindly agreed to waive the incoming wire transfer fees (which are normally $10 per transaction) since we are a non-profit. With their support we can now offer direct bank transfers to all of our supporters.

If you’ve been wanting to make a donation to MetaBrainz, but weren’t able to do it previously, please consider sending us a donation now! To get our bank information, please contact us.

Also, I wanted to thank Jessica Rynerson of WaMu for her excellent help getting us set up and arranging for our wire transfer fees to be waived. Thanks very much!

UPDATE: I’ve removed our bank information since people immediately started to pass fake checks trying to rip us off. Fortunately the bank has caught all of these bogus checks!

[ I apologize for the lateness of this post — the holidays kept me busy ]

I’m pleased to announce that John Buckman of Magnatune and Bookmooch joined the MetaBrainz Board of Directors on December 13th. John is both a geek and a music lover and he embodies both of these passions with his online record label Magnatune. Given his position in the cutting edge space of online record labels and his technical background make him perfectly suited for helping out the MetaBrainz Foundation as a board member.

John replaces Joichi Ito, who has recently taken on the role of chairman of the Creative Commons. Joi is busier than ever, making it difficult for him to participate in the day-to-day operations of the MetaBrainz Foundation. Joi, just as Larry Lessig, stays on as board member emeritus in an advisory role.

Thank you for all of your help Joi and welcome aboard John!

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