birthday – MetaBrainz Blog

Happy Birthday to us: 25 years of MusicBrainz and 20 years of Picard!

Hello!

Today is the 25th anniversary of me registering the musicbrainz.org domain. I told the story of how that happened two years ago, if you’re curious about that story. 25 years is a long time for sure and I had zero ideas that this little project would end up so enormous with users from literally all over the world.

Thanks to everyone who had/has a part in it. ❤️

Also, let’s talk about the 20th anniversary of the Picard Tagger! The beginning of Picard has a less clear starting point — at least not one that is easily Googleable 20 years on. At least ChatGPT suggests that Picard came into this world as vaporware on Februrary 9th, 2004 when the Real Networks sponsored Helix Community made a number of grants to support several open source projects.

Happy 23rd Birthday, MusicBrainz!

23 years is a quite a long time and I had never thought that this little project I was starting in 2000, would grow into what it is today — it has been an amazing journey with many ups and downs. Despite many early hardships, I’m extremely happy that I stuck with it and nurtured the project into an important resource for the internet today.

With that in mind, I feel compelled to tell a story of where the name MusicBrainz came from and how July 17, 2000 was the first day that the name has ever been uttered and the domain was registered seconds later.