Introduction
In 2009 MusicBrainz placed a greater emphasis on working on our Next Generation Schema (NGS) and not focusing on business aspects of MusicBrainz as much. This turns out to have been a good strategy as 2009 was a lousy year to do business; the entire world economy was depressed. Many other non-profits had a really hard year, struggling to keep afloat. Fortunately the MetaBrainz Foundation managed to remain in the black for its fifth year in a row!
The most important aspect of work for MusicBrainz was NGS and after several years of planning we really kicked NGS development into high gear in May. Our employee Oliver Charles and our top contributor Lukáš Lalinský teamed up to tackle NGS as their combined Google Summer of Code project. Over the summer the codebase that Oliver had been tending for nearly a year already got another overhaul. And, by the end of summer a strong new MusicBrainz Server emerged! Paul Taylor took over the development of the Search Server and delivered a project that used 1/3 of the computing power than the code it replaced. In 2009 we only had one server release that brought us Release Groups and ISRC support — we had planned to have many more releases, but instead we opted to work on NGS full speed ahead.
2009 was also a year of many other changes: We switched from the MoinMoin wiki to MediaWiki; we started moving from Trac to Jira for bug tracking and we started the process of moving from Subversion to Git for the main server codebase. And Kuno Woudt quit his job and prepared to come to work for the MetaBrainz Foundation in February 2010. In November 2009 we also gathered in Nürnberg Germany for the 10th MusicBrainz summit. Finally, Carol Smith of Google became our Secretary/Treasurer in December!
In many ways 2009 was a transformative year for MusicBrainz with an amazing amount of effort spent on improving the site for future growth. Sadly we didn’t see many fruits of our labors in 2009, but 2010 promises to be amazing as we roll out NGS!
Profit & Loss
In 2009 the foundation took in $103,387.77 and spent $97,685.50 for a total excess income $5,702.27. This excess income is down from $31,724.40 from the prior year; there were two primary reasons for this decrease in revenue: 1) The economic climate of 2009 was terrible and 2) the BBC had a 6 month delay in renewing their data license contract, which accounts for $9000 lost revenue that we’ll collect in the first half of 2010. Given these two factors, I’m pleased with the outcome for 2009!
Income
| Direct Donations | $30,170.00 |
| PayPal Donations | $7,631.97 |
| GSoC Mentor Income | $1000.00 |
| Live Data Feed licenses | $42,078.50 |
| CC Data licenses | $2,800.00 |
| Interest | $517.53 |
| Amazon Associates | $1,112.21 |
| CD Baby Affiliate | $19.00 |
| Tagger Affiliates | $17,842.96 |
| Reimbursements | $215.60 |
| Total Income: | $103,287.77 |
Expenses
| Bank fees | $366.67 |
| PayPal fees | $1,243.34 |
| Rent | $2,856.00 |
| Hardware | $3,152.56 |
| Travel | $2,229.15 |
| Internet | $100.00 |
| Marketing | $100.00 |
| Development | $67,231.41 |
| Gifts | $16.81 |
| Events | $1,481.18 |
| Hosting | $15,475.00 |
| Utilities | $13.42 |
| Filing Fees | $50.00 |
| Entertainment | $300.16 |
| Insurance | $2,025.00 |
| Accounting | $1,000.00 |
| Shipping | $44.71 |
| Total Expenses: | $97,685.50 |
The Profit & Loss shows:
- It costs $18,627.56 to host MusicBrainz in 2009 — this includes hardware and hosting costs.
- PayPal donations, which are end-user donations, come to $7,631.97 about 7.3% of our overall income. This is down from 10.5% in 2008, presumably because of the horrible economic times. Counting Tagger Affiliate income (which is income from end-users via our Tagger Affiliates) our end-user contributions totaled $25,474.93, which exceeds our hosting costs by $6,847.37. This means that we’re still well within our goal of having end-user contributions cover our hosting costs — even in a down economy.
- Development costs in the form of salaries cost $67,231.41 for both Robert Kaye and Oliver Charles. This figure will increase drastically in 2010 since Kuno Woudt joined the team. This presents the largest financial challenge facing the foundation in 2010.
- $44,878.50 was earned in license fees in 2009. Counting the BBC license fees that should have been collected in 2009 we would be at $53,878.50 as compared to $62,872.56 in 2008. Our license fee income represents 52.1% of our income, up from 49.7% in 2008.
In 2009 the foundation spent $18,627.56 on hosting and hardware costs and served out 2.1 billion web hits and 1.3 billon web service hits. Calculating a cost per hit, we find that we spent $8.66 per one million web hits and $14.37 per one million web service hits. These values are down significantly from the 2008 values of $16.21 and $26.58 respectively.
Balance Sheet
The balance sheet for the end of 2009 showed the MetaBrainz Foundation with $71,309.67 retained earnings, a net income of $5,702.27 and a total of cash assets of $77,011.94.
Traffic
The following chart shows our overall web traffic to musicbrainz.org for 2007 – 2009:
(click on the image to see a larger version)
The blue line represents the overall number of hits to musicbrainz.org. The red line shows how many of the overall hits were web service (API) hits; In 2009 60% of our hits were web service hits, which stays roughly consistent with our figure of 60.9% in 2008. Please note that this does not mean that 40% of our hits were full pages that were served; the total hit count includes images and other static content required to load a web page. It appears that about 10%-15% of our total hits were complete pages we served.
Top contributors
Top editors
1. drsaunde 80921 2. murdos 45003 3. nikki 41438 4. brianfreud 40312 5. voiceinsideyou 39372 6. NAvAP 29648 7. ojnkpjg 28369 8. reosarevok 28132 9. crazee_canuck 25100 10. MeinDummy 24914 11. fred576 24891 12. gnu_andrew 22367 13. salo.rock 21668 14. mr_maxis 21620 15. HumHumXX 20082 16. Senax 19867 17. cooperaa 17980 18. jesus2099 16320 19. Dr. Default 15601 20. chabreyflint 13297 21. MrH 13135 22. zos18 12524 23. KRSCuan 12179 24. Fabe56 11544 25. mudcrow 10603
Top voters:
1. voiceinsideyou 47841 2. murdos 34898 3. chabreyflint 31919 4. drsaunde 30487 5. MClemo 28067 6. KRSCuan 22779 7. Fabe56 19651 8. ojnkpjg 18192 9. nikki 16656 10. bogdanb 15239 11. wheelpoint 13891 12. chiark 13299 13. SuicideScrub 12843 14. NAvAP 11362 15. PhantomOTO 11238 16. teleguise 10963 17. Plagueis 10924 18. salo.rock 10724 19. MeinDummy 10402 20. ulugabi 10112 21. DrMuller 9818 22. yoursvivek 9674 23. fred576 7924 24. cooperaa 7787 25. pankkake 7154
A big thank you to all of the editors/voters who contributed! MusicBrainz would be nothing without your hard work!
Server farm
MusicBrainz has grown to 14 machines in service:
From the top, going down:
- moose: Our database server
- scooby: Our aging catch all server: blog, forums, mailing lists, etc
- catbus: Raw database server (raw tags, collections, etc)
- bender: Former TRM server, now idle cold spare machine
- blik: memcached
- stimpy, dexter: web service servers
- cartman: Search index builder
- wiley: New catch all server: SVN, git, jira, trac, backups
- tails: Web server
- lenny/carl: Redundant network gateways
- misty/jem: Search servers
MusicBrainz currently requires somewhere between 5 and 6 mbits of bandwidth per second and draws 19 Amps of current for a power consumption of about 2,090 Watts. MusicBrainz physically occupies 20Us of space (half of a rack) at Digital West in San Luis Obispo, CA. Additionally, we have a mirror server was hosted at Last.fm in London and a test server hosted by Amplifind Media Services in Los Angeles.
Words of Appreciation
2009 was often challenging; trying to retool a large web site on a shoe-string budget is never fun. But in the end 2009 was the best year in MusicBrainz history — never before did we accomplish as much as we did in 2009!
Oliver Charles, Kuno Woudt, Paul Taylor, Lukáš Lalinský, Aurélien Mino, Nikki, Pavan Chander, Phillip Wolfer and Brian Schweitzer — your contributions to MusicBrainz cannot be underestimated! And, Dave Evans, continues to be our behind the scenes hero — MusicBrainz keeps running because of you! Also a big thanks to our board of directors who keep me in line and ensure that we keep out of legal trouble. I’d also like to thank Google and the entire Open Source Programs Office for supporting MusicBrainz in 2009 again.
Onward to an exciting 2010!
