Category: MetaBrainz

For the past few years we’ve had some accounting difficulties with one of our customers: Amazon. I have no idea how their accounting and vendor systems work, but apparently we ended up in their system 4 different ways. And payment methods were horribly confused — it was a mess all around.

Invoice #144, for our Live Data Feed service that Amazon subscribes to, has been outstanding for almost three years now (it will be 3 years in January, but I wanted to get this money to come in in 2013). To be honest, there could be some confusion on our or on Amazon’s part — in fact the invoice may not be outstanding anymore. The fact of the matter is that we can’t seem to figure out what exactly is going on, but no money is flowing from Amazon to us and we’re owed somewhere around $20,000. (Which is near 10% of our annual budget incidentally)

For the last 6 months I’ve stepped up my pestering to get this resolved. I’ve been assured progress for the past 6 months, but nothing has happened. Promises of progress, then nothing. Again and again. I finally had an idea how to make change happen: Send Amazon an anniversary cake and post a picture of it publicly!

I even told my Amazon contacts about this idea, but it didn’t really catalyze anything. Then I finally set a deadline of Dec 2nd. The deadline came and went with more unfulfilled promises, so on December 2nd I picked up the phone and ordered a cake. Larsen’s Danish Bakery in Seattle were quite lovely to work with and created this cake for us:

A friend of mine went to the bakery, snapped this picture and then delivered the cake to Amazon HQ. It was accepted at the reception with promises that it would be delivered to its recipient. Then we started tweeting and Cory posted an entry to BoingBoing “Charity sends Amazon a cake celebrating 3d anniversary of unpaid invoice“.

For almost 24 hours nothing happened, but then I got email from my contact at Amazon telling me that the Accounts Payable team found a problem that was blocking payments from being sent to us, that the problem was now fixed and that they were investigating means to prevent this from happening again.

My contact goes on to say that a check will be cut tomorrow an overnighted to us. And that I should expect one more email telling me who on Amazon will be managing our relationship going forward. And, I have a voicemail pending from a person at Amazon’s accounts payable team to finally resolve the matter of the 3 year old invoice.

Sending this cake was quite effective! For $30 I managed to wake up Amazon, send a clear message that our account was not being managed well, that their AP team has some issues to address and that I wanted to fix our relationship. From where I stand, I see that these issues are on track for being resolved. Thanks for stepping up your game, Amazon!

Finally, I would like to say that all the people I’ve dealt with at Amazon have been polite and were honestly trying to help me. The real reason, from what I can tell, is that Amazon employees are constantly overworked and that MetaBrainz is such a small organization that its hard for them to really find the time to manage this relationship.

I’m glad that Amazon didn’t just cancel their contract with us and I’m looking forward to an improved working relationship going forward.

We’ve just received our annual sponsorship from Google’s Open Source Programs Office to the tune of $40,000. Thanks so much for continuing to sponsor us, Google!

At the current count we’ve received nearly a quarter million dollars from Google’s Open Source Programs Office, which is truly amazing. Thanks for all your support, it clearly makes a big difference in our operations!

The continued economic turmoil persisted in 2012 and thus it was a slow year for adding new customers for MetaBrainz. However, we did add one high profile customer in 2012: AOL Music.

For a number of reasons we felt that it was prudent to get MusicBrainz integrated into AOL before making public news about it. Now the time is finally right to talk about our relationship with AOL and Winamp. I had been talking to Geno Yoham (GM of Winamp) and Lisa Namerow (GM of AOL Music) about MusicBrainz at various conferences for several years. Forging relationships with large companies take a quite a long time and the formation of our relationship was really no different. At the end of 2011 Geno, Lisa and team were ready to take action and surprised me by pledging a sizeable donation to the MetaBrainz Foundation. This donation was received early in 2012 about the same time that we signed the data license contract. And just last week we received another donation for 2012!! Thanks AOL and Winamp!

Early in 2012 AOL launched updated services underpinned by MusicBrainz data:

• The Now Playing feature in Winamp allows a user to find out more about the artist that is currently playing in Winamp.
• The AOL Music Artist pages also use MusicBrainz data to display discography information and to provide some of the links for the other content shown on those pages.

Our relationship with AOL follows a similar pattern to our relationship to the BBC. The BBC has done wonders for highlighting and lending credibility to MusicBrainz and I expect that our relationship with AOL will bring about similar benefits for MusicBrainz.

Thank you team AOL and especially to Geno Yoham and Lisa Namerow for believing in us!

I’m pleased to announce that 7digital and The Echo Nest have become our latest customers!

7digital enables a lot of digital music stores and provides a lot of services for mobile operators. 7digital has relationships with many labels and thus faces complex metadata issues. I’m quite pleased that 7digital has chosen to partner with MusicBrainz to fix these metadata issues.

The Echo Nest provides tons of digital music services and is a driving force behind Music Hack Days here in the States. The Echo Nest also created project Rosetta Stone, a service that translates to/from MusicBrainz IDs from/to other ID spaces like the Echo Nest IDs or Rdio IDs.

Welcome to the MusicBrainz ecosystem!

I’m pleased to announce that Matthew Hawn from Last.fm has joined our board of directors. Matthew is a veteran of the music industry who has worked for big music labels in the past and today fills the role of VP of Product at Last.fm. Matthew joining our board of directors reflects our shared history and the closer collaboration between MusicBrainz and Last.fm

Welcome on board Matthew!

Matthew replaces outgoing director Derek Sivers. Derek, the founder of CD Baby, has been with MetaBrainz since its beginning of the organization and has looked out for us many times. We really appreciate everything you’ve done for us Derek!

UPDATE: Fixed Matthew’s title.

Once again, Google has donated $40,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation in support of MusicBrainz. Thank you Chris DiBona and Cat Allman at the Open Source Programs Office at Google! Your support has helped MusicBrainz along more than any other organization — thank you for your continued support!

In an effort to retire some old power-hungry servers, we’ve moved MusicBrainz Classic to a new server and also created a new MetaBrainz Foundation web site. The new MetaBrainz site looks like the MusicBrainz NGS site and shares a bit of the same code.

Please open a bug if you find problems with either of these two sites.

Thanks to Ollie for hacking together the metabrainz site!

I’m very happy to announce that another organization has made a large donation to MusicBrainz. Like our other donation from 2012, this company would also like to remain anonymous for the time being.

There is one thing very different about this donation: Its from a record label!

Not too long ago we didn’t have any contacts with record labels and the record labels didn’t really want much to do with us, but that has changed. This signals a deeper adoption of MusicBrainz in the music industry, which I find quite interesting and exciting!

Thank you for your generosity, anonymous donor!