Category: MetaBrainz

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!

I’m now over two weeks behind in posting the finances for June — please bear with me, while I battle PayPal a bit. I’ve been using their export to QuickBooks feature to download the transactions for all the donations we’ve been receiving. But, for some unknown reason, that option is no longer available — only export to tab/comma delimited files, and QuickBooks can’t import those files.

I’d have to write a converter that takes CSV files and translates them into quickbooks files — something I am trying to avoid. Thus I am waiting for a reply back from PayPal about what’s going on.

If this is not resolved by next week, I’ll go write the script and get our finances back on track.

UPDATE: PayPal permanently removed this feature, with no explanation as to why — I guess we join the ranks of people who have gotten screwed by PayPal. I just wish they would’ve notified me. Grrr.

Matthew Exon asked a few great questions about the MetaBrainz Foundation launch, and I wanted to share my answers with everyone here on this blog:

On Apr 19, 2005, at 3:58 AM, Matthew Exon wrote:

> Congratulations! This is certainly a big step for MusicBrainz, and I’m

> sure it gives all of us a greater feeling of confidence and

> responsibility about the whole project.

Thanks — I’m glad to hear that. I’m trying to project that on a much larger scale. To the point where corporations get that sense too.

> The teasers on the test MetaBrainz page over the last couple of weeks

> have raised some questions for me, so this is my chance to ask if you

> could clarify some of them for me. I don’t expect full dissertations

> to

> turn up on the MetaBrainz site overnight, and I guess it would be

> prudent for you not to respond to some things here, but you might be

> interested to know what questions occur to this punter in the street.

Do you mind if I post this response to the MB blog? Your questions a excellent and until I can have a fully articulated position on the licenses, I’d like to have something to refer to.

Continue reading “Questions about the MetaBrainz launch”

Gordon Mohr, who is currently working at the Internet Archive was given the opportunity to donate $300 to a non-profit with a compatible mission to the Internet Archive. Gordon chose the MetaBrainz Foundation and thus we just received a check for $300.

Thank you very much to both Gordon and Brewster Kahle, the driving force behind the Internet Archive!

In other news, we just received our official tax-exempt notification from the IRS — this can take months or even years. With the skilled help from our lawyers we were able to do it in just over 5 weeks of time — amazing.

Now that we’re completely in business, we will make an announcement to this effect sometime in January — stay tuned!

The IRS has just acknowledged our non-profit tax exempt application that I filed on October 29:

And with this, I should finally be able to turn on the Amazon associate ids for the site, so we can start earning a little bit more money. And there is also a Cafe Press t-shirt we can start selling. Stay tuned!

At long last, after many hours of work and months of time passing, I’ve FedEx’ed off the 1023 Application to the IRS. The 1023 form is the tax-exempt application to the IRS — once we get an advance ruling on our status (the final ruling will come many months down the road) we’ll be able to conduct business as a real non-profit and start handing out tax-deductible receipts for the donations we receive for MusicBrainz.

I feel confident that we’re well setup — this is mainly due to the excellent guidance I’ve received from Randy Heinig at Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum Perlman & Nagelberg LLP in Chicago. Thank you very much Randy for all your patience, hard work and thorough understanding of what MusicBrainz does!

Hopefully this will also mark the point where I can spend a little less time on the non-profit and start hammering out more code for MusicBrainz — it’s sorely needed. But before I dream of that, we still need to announce this new venture. Stay tuned for more on that!