MetaBrainz Foundation Annual Report for 2007

(Yes, this report is a year late — I had spent a lot of time on the annual report for 2006 and got so little feedback on it that I assumed no one cared. But now in 2008 I’ve been getting many more requests, so I’ve gone back and with the help of Pavan compiled the stats for 2007.)

Profit & Loss

In 2007 the foundation took in $89,645.59 and spent $64,543.84 for a total profit of $25,101.75. (non-profits can still earn a profit, but that profit must be reinvested into the company, not paid out to its officers and directors.) A detailed break down of where the income came from and where it went to is shown below:

Income

Direct donations $30,205.00
PayPal donations $14,575.59
Consulting (GSoC Mentor income) $1,500
Live Data Feed licenses $30,340.47
CC Data Licenses $1,900.00
Interest $357.45
Amazon Associates $714.39
Tagger Affiliates $10,052,69
Total income:   89,645.59

Expense

Bank fees $64.65
PayPal fees $1,570.92
Rent $2,779.00
Hardware $732.06
Travel $2,933.49
Internet $89.01
Marketing $765.00
Development $39,500
Supplies $56.88
Events $400.92
Hosting $12,240.00
Filing Fees $25.00
Software $-41.45
Entertainment $27.32
Insurance $1,996.00
Accounting $1,200.00
Total expense:   $64,543.84

This Profit & Loss shows:

  • It cost $12,972.06 to host MusicBrainz in 2007 — this includes hardware and hosting costs.
  • PayPal donations, which represent end-user support for MusicBrainz, came to $14,575.59, 16.3% of our total income. The Foundation aims to have end-user donations pay for the actual cost of running the service and the end-users did in fact pay for slightly more than what it cost to host MusicBrainz in 2007!
  • As it is with a lot of companies, salaries accounted for the largest slice of expenses. The Foundation paid $39,500 in salaries to Robert Kaye in 2007, which was still far below a reasonable salary level for an Engineer/Executive Director in California.
  • $32,240.47 was earned licensing the MusicBrainz data for commercial use, which represents 40% of the total income.

In 2007 the foundation spent $12,972.06 on hosting and hardware costs and served out 725 million web hits and 386 million web service hits. Calculating a cost per hit, we find that we spent $17.89 per one million web hits and $33.58 per one million web service hits. These values are up slightly from the 2006 values of $17.56 and $30.58 respectively.

Balance Sheet

The balance sheet for the end of 2007 showed the MetaBrainz Foundation with $14,323.45 retained earnings, a net income of $25,101.75 and total cash assets of $39,525.20.

Traffic

The following chart shows our traffic growth for 2007 and 2008:

Musicbrainz Traffic 2007-2008
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; as you can see towards the end of 2007 half of our overall hits were web service hits.

Top data contributors

Top editors:

drsaunde 125665
ojnkpjg 106211
brianfreud 102090
mudcrow 44423
murdos 32111
teleguise 26541
dmppanda 23264
cooperaa 16705
Schika 16420
zout 16160
voiceinsideyou 15268
artysmokes 13380
Kerensky97 12174
foolip 11403
lukz 11031
bench12345 10014
AnAlach 9323
gioele 8742
headlocker 8450
Pianissimo84 8364
SenRepus 8183
leivhe 7815
Liff 7748
lytron 7740
zos18 7533

Top voters:

drsaunde 47850
ojnkpjg 41365
brianfreud 27382
voiceinsideyou 19874
cooperaa 19348
headlocker 16183
lukz 13792
mudcrow 12861
gioele 11259
cadalach 10677
bogdanb 10496
CatCat 9214
symphonick 8767
teleguise 8571
Dr. Default 8313
BrianG 7936
crazee_canuck 7842
keschte 7838
cybercox 7802
Xaiver 7699
Pianissimo84 7175
murdos 7165
artysmokes 6495
helver 6349
debris77 6276

A big thank you to all of the editors/voters who contributed!

The Dashboard is back!

After the last release our new spiffy lastupdate feature that was supposed to keep track of when data in the database changed brought our database server to its knees. 🙁

The problem was that if we had an artist, we would also go update all of its releases. And if you updated a release, the artist and label had to be updated. We turned off all of the cascading updates and our server went back to normal.

Thus, for the time being updates will not cascade. If you update an artist, none of the releases or associated labels will update. In the future we will see if we can improve on this.

The good news in this is that the Dashboard feature is still useful, so I’ve turned it back on and made it live on the main server.

P.S. We just passed our 10 millionth edit!!

General update: Things are hoppin'!

A belated Happy New Year to all MusicBrainzers out there!

If things seem quiet in MusicBrainz land, don’t be fooled! The style mailing list is quite busy with activity as the style process has been rebooted. Development is happening at a frenzied pace as most developers are focusing on the server rewrite that has been in progress since summer last year. In a sense its already fulfilling one of its goals: More developers are taking a look at the improved, easier to understand and easier to install codebase. I don’t think we’ve ever had this many developers tinkering with the server source code!

We’re now in the process of coordinating a growing team of developers and charting the course for future releases. Its still too early to really tell what the next release will include exactly, but once a concrete plan starts shaping up, I’ll post an update here. Also, another team of people is hard at work at creating a new binary install of Picard for OS X. You can follow all the happenings on the developers mailing list.

Finally, the MetaBrainz Foundation, the legal entity that pays the bills for MusicBrainz made it through another year of being self sufficient! In 2008 the non-profit earned $126,442.26 and spent $94,717.79. Now we have $30,000 more in the bank than we did this time last year. This finally gives us money to spend on development to move MusicBrainz along! For all the details on how we earned/spent our money, check out our finances page and our 2008 Profit and Loss statement.

Finally, the BBC continues to tout the virtues of MusicBrainz: BBC Music talking semantics

Onward into an exciting 2009 we go!

Connectivity problems resolved

A few of you have reported problems with connectivity to the MusicBrainz site in the last week. With help from various people in Canada and Europe we’ve been able to provide information for Digital West (our provider) to fix the problem. As of 11:38 PST the problem was fixed.

If you are still experiencing problems, please post a comment here or open a bug in our bug tracker.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience!

New customer: Cloudspeakers in Utrecht

I’m pleased to announce that I signed a new customer in the Netherlands yesterday! I met the Cloudspeakers team in Utrecht and spent a day discussing their business and how Cloudspeakers can work with MusicBrainz in the future.

After many conversations during the day, we ceremoniously signed the data license contract over an elegant and extremely tasty Indonesian meal. A day well spent!

A big thanks to Chris, Stan, Adriaan, Charlie and Francis! Thanks for inviting me, paying for meals and even my flight to the Netherlands. I look forward to working with you!

Calling all guinea pigs!

I come bringing good news! With the latest version of the server now out in the wild, we’re ready to move on to the next stage of MusicBrainz development. But first a quick refresher…

You may recall, many moons ago I (Oliver Charles aka aCiD2) began work on moving the mb_server codebase from our own in-house framework, to the tried and tested Catalyst framework – along with separating out the HTML into separate Template Toolkit templates. Well, after what seems like an age, it’s finally got to the time where I can start getting some critical feedback from the most important people – you!

As from now, test.musicbrainz.org is now running the development branch of this work. It’s important to realise that this new codebase currently has no javascript support. This decision was made because it’s very important we get the website fully functional, and then add bells and whistles on later. We’re starting from a mostly clean slate, so there’s a lot of chance of things breaking, and JavaScript was likely to be just one more headache.

Oh, and I’ve never deployed a server like this before, so please bare with me while I work out any problems running the server. I’m going to London tomorrow and coming back Saturday evening (slightly bad timing, I’m aware) – but I’ll do my best to check any messages that come my way!

However, before you jump straight in and overload us with work – I’d like to lay down some guidelines for providing us with feedback. This will (hopefully) ensure that we can see to these bugs as fast as possible.

Where to report:

Standard practice- report at our bugtracker – bugs.musicbrainz.org

What should you report?

The most important things to report are actions that cause errors to occur, invalid behaviour or features that are simply not available, but are from the main server. You should also report typos and other visual problems – but I will be encouraging people to help fix these themselves (more on this later!).

What information should you provide?

The most critical information is that you can provide us with as much context as possible. Please let us know:

  • Any steps to reproduce the problem
  • Whether you are logged in or not
  • The address of the page that caused the problem
  • As much information as possible from the top of the error page

The last point relates somewhat to Catalyst. Catalyst features improved error handling and can provide us with a stack trace. You should try and include this stack trace, and the errors at the top. Chances are, we’ll be able to reproduce this from the information you provide – but if not, the stack trace gives us one more pointer to where the problem is 🙂

How should you organise the report?

Generally speaking, just try to fill in as many of the fields as possible. I’ll be reading every single report that comes in, and re-filing it myself where necessary. Ideally, set the component to ‘MusicBrainz’, the milestone to ‘Server: TemplateToolkit’ and assign the bug to me 🙂

So…

Let the bug crunching begin!

Main server updated

We just completed pushing the latest changes out to the main servers! We had a bit of a bumpy ride to roll out the upgrade — we’re noticing quite a few problems with collections right now and the Last Update feature brought our database server to its knees. As a result, we’ve disabled the Dashboard — we’ll re-enable it once we figure out what the problem is.

If you encounter a problem with the server, please file a bug report and select the 2008-11-23 version. Also, please check the open bug list to see if your problem has been reported before.

For a complete list of things that changed for this release, please see the release page on the wiki.

This massive release was brought to you by the tireless efforts of: Luks, Murdos, Djce, Jugdish, Acid2, Niklas and myself. Loads and loads of good testing came from Voiceinsideyou and Nikki. Thanks to everyone who helped with this release!

Also, if you’ve used Jugdish’s enhanced voting GreaseMonkey script, please disable it as it may cause problems since that functionality was included in this server release.

Reminder: Server update is coming this Sunday. And TRM are going away!

I’d like to remind everyone that the next server release is scheduled for this Sunday November 23. We’re still working on scheduling for the release, but it will happen on Sunday. Expect the MusicBrainz to be unavailable for at least 1 hour.

Also, please be aware that with this release the TRM server will be decommissioned — the Classic Tagger will then be officially deprecated, but it should continue to work — even without TRM support.

The BBC has hired a full time MusicBrainz server developer!

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Matthew Wood, the BBC has officially hired Jason Emmett to work full time on the MusicBrainz server!

Jason, who will be working in the BBC offices in London will be working with Oliver to finish the port to Template Toolkit branch. After that both of them will tackle the Release Groups that we’ve deemed to be a worthy intermediary step. A few weeks ago the MusicBrainz server had only table scraps of love, moving it along quite slowly. Today we have nearly 1.5 full time people working on the server source code. This gives me tons of hope that we can shoot for doing 3-4 releases in 2009.

Thank you so much for all of your efforts, Matthew Wood. Thank you for all of your support BBC! Welcome on board Jason!