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!
Category: MetaBrainz
We've just launched our new MetaBrainz site!
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!
Another anonymous donation: ~$7500
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!
Server donation and finances for 2011
I’m pleased to announce that an anonymous company decided to donate a pile of 20 Supermicro servers to us!! I’ve tallied up and estimated a value for all of these servers and it comes to $49,480!
Out of that pile of servers, I’ve built 10 servers that are very close to the servers that we purchased during our fundraiser last year. Two servers are nearly ready for use and a bunch of other servers decorate (read: fill up) my tiny office. Thanks so much to our anonymous donors — you’re going to help us grow over the next couple of years! With the rate at which our traffic is growing, the timing of this donation couldn’t be better!
If anyone wants to send dark chocolate to our donors as a thank you, please do! Just send them to MetaBrainz and I’ll pass them on our friends.
The timing of this donation was especially spot-on since it put us into the black for 2011. With a scant excess revenue (retained earnings) of $4,166.91 on revenues of $239,756.07, we barely made it. Phew. See our financial reports for all of 2011, if you care to get more details!
That closes an exciting year for MusicBrainz/MetaBrainz! We hope to have the annual report published before the month is out.
Thanks for an amazing 2011 everyone!
MetaBrainz Foundation Annual Report for 2010
Introduction
2010 was a big development year for us with an amazing amount of tangible progress on the Next Generation Schema (NGS). NGS would prove to be our number one task in 2010, with no server releases happening at all because of our focus on NGS.
Early in the year we increased our engineering capacity with Kuno Woudt joining us as a full time developer in February; Oliver Charles moved from a part time position into a full time position in June 2010. Their sole focus for the entire year was to finish NGS, and we got within a few months of finishing it.
We transitioned from Subversion to Git as our version control system in the process of writing NGS. From Nov 2009 to Feb 2010 the MusicBrainz Server codebase went from ~224,000 lines of code down to ~72,000 (the lowest since 2003!). By the end of 2010 we reached ~130,000 lines of code. NGS does a lot more, but with a lot less code. NGS was a much needed cleanup and overhaul of our aging codebase.
Financially we started 2010 off pretty weak, but got an early boost with a $50,000 donation from Richard Jones (one of the founders of last.fm) and later a $40,000 donation from Google. These generous donations allowed us to continue focusing on NGS — thank you Google and Richard Jones!
MetaBrainz took on The Guardian, musiXmatch, and ZeeZee as new data customers in 2010.
Google Summer of Code 2010 resulted in an exciting new addition to our product line – the MusicBrainz Android App. Developed by Jamie McDonald, the Android app allows anyone to carry the MusicBrainz Database around in their pocket wherever they go. It is a very handy app to settle music debates at parties!
Jess Hemerly conducted a study and wrote a paper on MusicBrainz as part of her Master’s program at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Among many other topics, she answered questions such as ‘Why do people contribute?’, ‘What characterizes editors’ participation?’, and ‘What is the role of metadata in music technology?’.
Profit & Loss
In 2010 the foundation took in $177,740.94 and spent $172,904.94 for a total excess income of $4,836.00.
Income
| Direct Donations | $90,278.89 |
| PayPal Donations | $6,867.99 |
| Consulting | $2,669.75 |
| Live Data Feed Licenses | $52,682.76 |
| CC Data Licenses | $5,100.00 |
| Amazon Associates | $1,299.94 |
| Tagger Affiliates | $18,147.62 |
| CD Baby Affiliate | $12.00 |
| Bank Credits | $0.10 |
| Bank Interest | $681.89 |
| Total Income: | $177,740.94 |
Expenses
| Bank Fees | $995.30 |
| PayPal Fees | $1,263.63 |
| Rent | $2,856.00 |
| Hardware | $5,455.15 |
| Travel | $4,806.26 |
| Internet | $184.56 |
| Development | $109,991.19 |
| Gifts | $458.63 |
| Events | $270.98 |
| Hosting | $16,900.00 |
| Filing Fees | $60.00 |
| Software | $99.00 |
| Entertainment | $331.53 |
| Books | $20.99 |
| Insurance | $2,025.00 |
| Accounting | $1,200.00 |
| Shipping | $87.51 |
| Payroll Taxes | $25,639.39 |
| Advertising | $259.82 |
| Total Expenses: | $172,904.94 |
The Profit & Loss shows:
- In 2010 the foundation spent $22,355.15 on hosting and hardware costs and served out 3.2 billion web hits and 1.5 billon web service hits. Calculating a cost per hit, we find that we spent $6.93 per one million web hits and $14.50 per one million web service hits. Compared to our 2009 figures of $8.66 per one million web hits and $14.37 per one million web service hits, these numbers didn’t change much.
- End-user donations via PayPal came to $6,867.99 which is roughly 10% less than last year. End-user donations came to less than 4% of our overall income due to the much larger role of sponsors such as Google and Richard Jones.
- Development costs in the form of salaries paid to Robert Kaye, Oliver Charles, and Kuno Woudt came to $109,991.19. It is amazing what we were able to accomplish with such a limited budget for paid engineers.
- In 2010 we earned $52,682.76 from live data feed licenses and $5,100.00 from Creative Commons licensed data for a total of $57,782.76. This is up 28.8% from the total of $44,878.50 in 2009.
Balance Sheet
The balance sheet for the end of 2010 showed the MetaBrainz Foundation with $77,011.94 retained earnings, a net income of $4,836.00, and cash assets totalling $81,847.94.
Traffic
The following chart shows our overall web traffic to musicbrainz.org for 2006 – 2010:
The blue line represents the overall number of hits to musicbrainz.org and the red line shows how many of the overall hits were web service (API) hits. As in previous years, our web service hits represent about 85% – 90% of our overall traffic. Please note that in September of 2009 we switched to a more accurate method for keeping track of our overall web services hits. Prior to this, the graph shows the sum of the artist/release/track counts, rather than the total web service traffic.
Our traffic grew considerably in the first half of 2010, but then leveled off for the second half of 2010. We don’t know what accounted for this leveling off, but we suspect that the lack of new features for the MusicBrainz server generally decreased interest in the project.
Top contributors
| Top Editors | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1. | drsaunde | 73982 |
| 2. | brianfreud | 72121 |
| 3. | gswanjord | 58933 |
| 4. | murdos | 54517 |
| 5. | HumHumXX | 43985 |
| 6. | dimpole | 39527 |
| 7. | salo.rock | 38644 |
| 8. | nikki | 37770 |
| 9. | reosarevok | 37702 |
| 10. | refresh_daemon | 34806 |
| 11. | jesus2099 | 33515 |
| 12. | Senax | 30956 |
| 13. | MeinDummy | 25521 |
| 14. | mr_maxis | 24743 |
| 15. | Billy Yank | 20248 |
| 16. | dinog | 20215 |
| 17. | crazee_canuck | 18537 |
| 18. | ojnkpjg | 18469 |
| 19. | Bitmap | 17612 |
| 20. | kepstin | 16550 |
| 21. | NAvAP | 16095 |
| 22. | Jeroen | 16064 |
| 23. | rswarbrick | 15972 |
| 24. | zos18 | 15204 |
| 25. | fred576 | 14897 |
| Top Voters | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1. | chabreyflint | 49247 |
| 2. | salo.rock | 48651 |
| 3. | murdos | 33786 |
| 4. | Locustus | 29267 |
| 5. | SuicideScrub | 24312 |
| 6. | bogdanb | 22473 |
| 7. | nikki | 21085 |
| 8. | brianfreud | 20606 |
| 9. | gswanjord | 19276 |
| 10. | Bitmap | 17956 |
| 11. | MClemo | 17362 |
| 12. | drsaunde | 15082 |
| 13. | KRSCuan | 13922 |
| 14. | dinog | 13844 |
| 15. | reosarevok | 9650 |
| 16. | MeinDummy | 9262 |
| 17. | HumHumXX | 8534 |
| 18. | mr_maxis | 7617 |
| 19. | PhantomOTO | 7194 |
| 20. | articpenguin | 7092 |
| 21. | ojnkpjg | 6977 |
| 22. | Plagueis | 6877 |
| 23. | alphaseven | 6762 |
| 24. | fatih | 6611 |
| 25. | alllysssa | 5819 |
Server farm
At the end of 2010, MusicBrainz had 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 server, index builder
- wiley: New catch all server: SVN, git, jira, wiki, trac, mail, backups
- lenny/carl: Redundant network gateways
- tails: Front end web server
- asterisk: Search server
- jem: Search server
MusicBrainz uses 6mbits of bandwidth per second and draws 21 Amps of current for a power consumption of about 2,310 Watts. MusicBrainz physically occupies 20Us of space (half of a rack) at Digital West in San Luis Obispo, CA.
Words of Appreciation
2010 was a challenging year for us, starting off with rocky finances, but support from Richard Jones and Google put us back on track. There were many people who thought that we could not ship NGS or that MusicBrainz would languish while we worked to complete NGS. Given that we had no server releases at all in 2010, we are pleased that the project remained relevant and that our community believed in us to finish NGS.
MusicBrainz would like to thank its community of stellar editors (see above), its core developers (Lukáš Lalinský, Oliver Charles, Kuno Woudt, Aurélien Mino), our hero of system administration, Dave Evans and our goddess of bug tracking, bug fixing, editing and all things unicode, Nikki. We thank Jamie McDonald for the awesome Android app he wrote and we’d also like to thank Pavan Chander for all of his contributions.
We’d like to thank Richard Jones, Google and every single donor who donated money to MetaBrainz in 2010. We’d also like to thank our board of directors (Cory Doctorow, Brian Zisk, Matt Wood, Rachel Segal/Carol Smith), our pro bono legal advisors Daniel Appelman and Ed Cavazos, our awesome hosting company Digital West and all of our customers. Finally, we would also like to thank the music teams at the BBC for their continued support and for motivating us to bring NGS to a close.
MetaBrainz Foundation was in the black for 2010!
I just posted the Profit & Loss for 2010 for the MetaBrainz Foundation!
Short summary: We earned $177k and we’re in the black by almost $5k, but we’re still not raking in the bucks.
But, a tiny non-profit being in the black for this crappy economic climate is awesome and makes me happy. Watch for a full annual report coming in the next few weeks!
MusixMatch becomes our customer!
MusixMatch, a new lyrics start-up company in Bologna, Italy just signed up to be our latest customer!
MusixMatch aims to license lyrics from all over the world (and not just the usual US/western Europe suspects) and aims to make accessing and licensing lyrics much easier than it currently is. I spent three days in June with the whole MusixMatch team to figure out how MusicBrainz and MusixMatch can work together, and we found a number of interesting ways in which we can help each other.
MusixMatch needs to match lyric publisher data to music metadata like the data in MusicBrainz. This matching will enable MusixMatch to instantly license lyrics to anyone who speaks MBIDs or anyone who can match their data to our metadata. And MusicBrainz will benefit from this relationship by being able to show lyrics on MusicBrainz pages, which enriches MusicBrainz and takes us one step further on our road to being a comprehensive music encyclopedia.
However, it should be noted that MusicBrainz is not getting into the lyrics business. We will never store Lyrics in our database since those are copyrighted! We plan to fetch lyrics from the MusixMatch servers to display them on our site. MusixMatch, however, plans to offer our music metadata and lyrics in a package deal once we’ve matched our data and have lyric support on musicbrainz.org.
All of this lyrics work will come after we’ve shipped NGS — until NGS we will not adapt any new features! We are really keeping our focus on delivering NGS as soon as we’re happy with its stability.
VLC, we love you, but we're seeing too much of you!
Dear VLC:
In the last month you grew to more than 25% of our traffic and this is hard for us to handle. We’ve limited the number of requests from VLC to 100 requests per 10 seconds. We need to find a way to help cover our costs for all of this traffic.
In other words, we need to sit down and chat, VLC. Please contact us!
Respectfully,
MusicBrainz
RJ of last.fm fame donates $50,000 to MetaBrainz!
RJ (Richard Jones), creator of Playdar and one of the founders of Last.fm, has just pledged to donate $50,000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation! This awesome donation will allow us to renew Kuno Woudt’s contract in a few months and will allow us to continue at a good development pace.
Thank you for your generous support, RJ!
Welcome our newest customer: ZeeZee
After a slow 2009, I’m glad to announce that we have a new customer for our live data feed: ZeeZee.de in Germany!
ZeeZee operates an interesting music service: You select music to record and that selected music is then downloaded from Internet Radio stations and organized so that you can download the music onto your own computer.
Welcome to the MusicBrainz ecosystem, ZeeZee!