Category: MetaBrainz

I’m immensely pleased to announce the first commercial project built with MusicBrainz data: Linkara Música

Linkara is a social networking site similar to Friendster here in the US. However, Linkara goes far beyond what Friendster has done and offers its users to connect on their interests in books, movies, and now music. Users can search for music/books/movies, rate them and find other people who share similar tastes.

Linkara is based in Barcelona, Spain and caters to the Spanish market — so be ready with your best Spanish skills when you click on the link above. I wanted to thank Tim Towle and the rest of the Linkara team for bearing with MetaBrainz as we worked out the legal contracts necessary to close this deal.

The amazing part of this announcement is that the MusicBrainz/MetaBrainz model works — it is possible to license public domain data! Even more amazing are the vast numbers of users who helped create MusicBrainz and enable Linkara Música. 183,000+ users have in some way or another participated in MusicBrainz and overall managed to not step on each others toes to create a growing database of music metadata. Thanks to everyone who has participated — this would not have happened without you!

P.S. I know that Last.fm has been using the MusicBrainz data for a while now, but we still haven’t entered into a business relationship yet, so it doesn’t count. Yet.

Technorati Tags: metabrainz, musicbrainz, linkara

[ Rather than respond to comments to the previous post, I will create a new post — I think this is important enough to clarify ]

Declin said:

> I don’t see how putting a particular license on the *data* solves the problem. Terms of *service* are something entirely different.

We’re not putting a new license on our data — the data remains under the existing licenses.

I am suggesting that the ToS for our web service state that:

1. Anyone can access the web service.
2. Data returned by the web service is covered under the CC license, since we may return data where portions are PD and portions are CC. We must use the greater common denominator license if we want to be consistent with our data licenses.

This has the effect that anyone can connect to our web service, but using the data returned from the service has to be use in accordance with the CC license. In order to not be in copyright violation, the user needs to qualify as non-commercial set out by the CC license. The two clarifications on non-profit I give serve to make it clear that these uses fall into the non-commercial realm, since the CC license errs on the side of commercial use if a use falls into a grey zone.

Technorati Tags: musicbrainz, web service

Continue reading “Web service ToS follow-up”

I just posted the Profit and Loss statement (PDF) for the MetaBrainz Foundation’s fiscal year 2005:

Income
4010 Income – Donations – PayPal	$ 13,768.31
4020 Income – Donations – General	$ 3,980.10
4040 Income – Licenses – Live Data Feed	$ 2,465.74
4070 Income – Bank – Interest	$ 13.02
4080 Income – Affiliate – Amazon	$ 122.66
Total Income	$ 20,349.83
Expense
5020 Expense – Bank – PayPal	$ 818.60
5040 Expense – Hosting – CCCP	$ 1,174.00
5050 Expense – Rent – Higuera Office	$ 2,000.00
5070 Expense – Hardware	$ 4,661.47
5080 Expense – Travel	$ 802.41
5090 Expense – Internet	$ 264.31
5100 Expense – Marketing	$ 155.00
5110 Expense – Development	$ 2,486.15
5120 Expense – Supplies	$ 51.52
5130 Expense – Gifts	$ 186.90
5140 Expense – Events	$ 355.02
Total Expense	$ 12,955.38
Net Income	$ 7,394.45

I’ve also posted the Balance Sheet for 2005 (PDF) and the Balance Sheet for December 2005 (PDF). While we weren’t wildly successful for our first full year in operation, we stayed in the black the entire time and certainly showed that we have a lot of public support. And the IRS cares much about public support for tax exempt non-profits.

Technorati Tags: metabrainz, finances

The year end fundraiser totalled $1,318.86 (+$100) dollars and thus exceeded our goal for purchasing new hardware!

Thanks to everyone who donated in the last days of 2005! The top donors were:

• AgentArts – $500
• Alexander Dupuy – $100
• Christopher Wilson – $100 (pledged, but not received yet)
• Drew Hess – $50
• Mathew Philip – $25
• Mark Nicholson – $25
• Mario Lia – $25
• Alexander Van Vucht – $25
• Eric Duerr – $25
• Geof Morris – $25

Thank you everyone!!

Technorati Tags: fundraiser, metabrainz

MusicBrainz’ servers are smoking and generally overloaded these days. Fortunately, we have one more unused server that needs drives and a RAID controller before we can use it. Rich Gibson, a friend of MusicBrainz has even pledged a place for us to stash the server for free!

So, to make that happen I would like to kill two birds with one stone:

1. Get you a tax deduction before tax year 2005 comes to a close
2. Get more hardware to bring another server online.

This will allow us to bring one new server online. This new server would be used for Picard tagging, calculating indexes for Picard and the upcoming PimpMyTunes command line tagger. Before too long we would also perform all MusicBrainz searches with this machine. This would give much better search results and lighten the load on the main database server.

From now until the end of the year, if we collect $500, I will purchase:

• Two Ultra 320 SCSI 36Gb drives for about $150 each
• One Adaptec Zero Channel RAID controller for about $200

and then boot the server and put it to use as outlined above. If we collect $1000, I will also purchase the following to upgrade zim (the all purpose server) from the current single drive configuration that is too small for our current needs:

• One SATA RAID Controller for about $250
• Two SATA150 200Gb Seagate drives for $150 each

If you feel like MusicBrainz needs more capacity and/or you could use a tax break on this year’s taxes, please make a donation today! If you prefer to send us a check, click the donate link for our address — just make sure that you drop the check in the mail before the year is over!

Technorati Tags: metabrainz, fundraiser

Due to Larry Lessig’s overwhelming schedule, Larry has moved into the Director Emeritus position on our board of directors. This means that Larry is less involved with day-to-day activities of the foundation, but still remains available to us for consulting on larger issues where we can use his expertise.

Taking his place is Brian Zisk from the Future of Music Coalition. Brian has an extensive tech background in the Silicon Valley, (Green Witch Radio, iCast, Xiph to name a few) as well as extensive contacts in the music industry through his co-founding of the Future of Music Coalition. Brian will be a perfect addition to our board and his presence will open a number of doors in the music industry for the MetaBrainz Foundation.

Welcome to the MetaBrainz Foundation, Brian!

Technorati Tags: metabrainz, board of directors

About a month ago, the MetaBrainz Foundation signed up its second customer (let’s call that customer Mystery Customer #2). In light of this and our current finances our Board of Directors approved for me to make this payment my very first paycheck.

Early today the first payment from this customer hit our PayPal account and I cut myself the very first MetaBrainz paycheck ever! While this check for $2400 is measly pay for a years worth of work, its a start. With more customers on the horizon I can hope for a reasonable paycheck in the next year. And me getting paid is good since I can stop hunting for contract work to pay the bills — this will allow me to focus more of my time on MusicBrainz. And everyone knows that we need to implement more features, right?

A new Picard, a new libmusicbrainz, a new libtunepimp and now a paycheck! What a week, and its only tuesday!

P.S. I can’t reveal who our customers are, since they are building new services based on our data. These services have not been announced yet and us talking about who these customers are, would tip their hands. As soon as these companies go public with their services, I’ll be sure to tell everyone who they are.

Technorati Tags: licenses, metabrainz, finances

I’ve finally posted the MetaBrainz Finances for June. I had to write a script that would take PayPal’s tab seperated format and crank out a QuickBooks compatible iif file. I’d rather spend time hacking on MusicBrainz proper, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

( This is one of of times where my programming skills saved my bacon. What do people who can’t program do? Lots of tedious work? )

I’m proud to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has just signed up the first client for its live data-feed service! This presents a major milestone for the foundation, since it proves that there are companies interested in and willing to pay for this service.

The only downside is that I cannot mention who this company is. This will have to stay secret until they roll out their product with our service under the hood. So, until then sit tight and stay tuned!