MusicBrainz – MetaBrainz Blog

Welcome Silona Bonewald, new MetaBrainz Foundation Executive Director!

We are very pleased to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has appointed Silona Bonewald as Executive Director, following the unfortunate passing of our Rob at the beginning of the year.

Silona has served as Executive Director of IEEE SA Open and Vice President of Community Architecture at Hyperledger, part of the Linux Foundation. Earlier in her career she served as Director of InnerSource at PayPal and authored the widely used O’Reilly publication Understanding the InnerSource Checklist.

Silona also founded the League of Technical Voters, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to government transparency through open source technology, and has since advised nonprofit and open source organizations including the Cardano community’s IntersectMBO, the Foundation for Public Code, and the Software Freedom Conservancy. She has served on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Austin chapter in the past and holds standing relationships across the world wide standards communities, and more… If you would like to keep browsing Silona’s looong list of professional credentials you are welcome to follow her on LinkedIn.

That’s all a long way to say that we are very excited to have Silona on board! The team is looking forward to working with Silona and you (our wonderful community) to carry Rob’s legacy forward.

Please give Silona a warm welcome in the comments!

Silona will also be hosting an AMA on 5 October 2026, at 17:00 UTC, on the forums (we will do another announcement regarding this, closer to the time), where you can post questions and share with Silona some of your dreams for the future of the MetaBrainz Foundation and its projects!

MusicBrainz Server update, 2026-09-21

Hi! It’s been a while since our last release since we have been working on stability improvements for both website and search to better cope with all the load we are handling recently. The first related changes are part of this release, with more to come, including limiting searches to 500 results (if you need something further down the search, sorry but you probably need a better search!). Additionally, the very annoying bug that sometimes lost track times when parsing tracklists should hopefully be gone now (thanks dvirtz!), and a lot more aggregator and shortener links are now blocked; even when not yet blocked, remember to always add all the relevant destination links rather than redirects and aggregators if possible.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to derat, dvirtz, ibmibmibm and mib for having contributed to the code. Thanks to DenizC, derat, dvirtz, HibiscusKazeneko, j.rohr, outsidecontext, Raman Sinclair, rinsuki and salo.rock for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to AligFu, AndrejsD1718, BestSteve, blueday, Covium, Denatura, EmO686, Flavia Telcean, joao_over9k, Kolesteraw, Life4649, liilliil, mfmeulenbelt, naturbrilian, NorwayFun, Priit Jõerüüt, pXF, syntariavoxmortem, TheParaziT, Vaclovas Intas, vacuousVersifier and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2026-09-21.0.

The super special (lousy) shirt plan

Editors are by far MetaBrainz’ biggest and most irreplaceable resource.

They (you) spend countless hours entering data for free, be it for the love of music, to tidy their own collections and listen histories, to support their scenes, to archive historical and cultural data, to apply the cool and soothing editing brain-balm, or a combination of all of the above and more.

Some of the top editors have provided the backbone of MusicBrainz for years, decades, and often perform the more tedious data maintenance and checking tasks.

A few summits ago, the question was asked – can we give these editors, say those with 1 million+ edits, some recognition without getting into the quagmire of things like gamifying?

Enter super special (lousy) shirt plan.

reo showcasing his super special lousy shirt – a *real* and rare image of a top MusicBrainz editor **outside**!?

Search upgrades: Nov 30, 2026

MusicBrainz is announcing a set of upgrades for its search service on November 30, 2026. The main change will be upgrading Solr from version 9 to 10. Fixes and improvements will be released alongside this. Some of these changes may break some specific search requests. Finally, a new feature will be released making it possible to use the search service to search for (musical) genres. See below for more information.

Breaking changes

The following tickets may break search requests in some way.

SEARCH-444: Improper ‘relation-list’ in ‘area’ and ‘url’ JSON output. This will be a breaking change for accessing related entities in area and URL search results.
SEARCH-642: Drop ‘id’ fields for cdstub and tag. This will technically be a breaking change, but it was broken by design as the values for these search fields are not documented and have never been intended for public use anyway.
SEARCH-666: Use quality names rather than numeric IDs. This will be a breaking change for release searches that use quality search field.
SEARCH-752: Relationships have an extra ‘target’ property in JSON output. Fixing it by removing the redundant property target will be a breaking change if you are accessing it in search results. The “proper” way to do this is to use the property target-type and access the property id under the property named after this target type.
SEARCH-764: Upgrade to Solr 10. This will be a breaking change for mirror owners only, not for search requests. More specifically, it is advised to change the Solr configuration and to re-index the whole MusicBrainz database.

Soft changes

The following tickets will improve search with breaking any requests:

SEARCH-452: Index all URL relationships. So far, only URL relationships to Artist and Release were indexed. URL relationships to all other entity types will be indexed too.
SEARCH-646: Return exact match first for tag search. It should improve tag search results using indexed Solr search compared to direct Postgres search.
SEARCH-677: Include disambiguation of event’s place and work’s recording. Places related to searched events and recordings related to searched works will now be outputted with disambiguation comment, in the same way other related entities are outputted in search results.
SEARCH-680: Index genre annotations. It will add genre annotations to the results of annotation search which is already supported for all other annotation-able entity types.
SEARCH-681: Support indexed search of genres. It will add “Genre” as a target type for search, just like most other searchable entity types.
SEARCH-751: Missing ‘target-type’ property in ‘relationships’ of ‘event’ and ‘work’ JSON output. This will be fixed by adding the property where it is missing.
SEARCH-753: Missing ‘target-type’ property in ‘relationships’ of ‘area’ and ‘url’ JSON output. This will be fixed by adding the property where it is missing.

Miscellaneous

A MusicBrainz Server release is also expected to go with some of these changes.

We’ll post upgrade instructions for standalone/mirror servers on the day of the release. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or on the relevant above-linked tickets.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2026-07-30

We’re happy to release our first MusicBrainz Server update since the schema change, following our migration of user accounts to the MetaBrainz website, which we’ve been spending most of our development time on until now. (This blog post also lags a bit behind the date we tagged the release, as you can tell from the title.)

In case you’re running a local MusicBrainz Server for development purposes, know that you can preserve the ability to log in without OAuth by adding sub LOCAL_ACCOUNTS_ENABLED { 1 } to lib/DBDefs.pm. (It’s already enabled by default if DEVELOPMENT_SERVER is.)

We’ve also made changes to digest authentication in the web service, detailed in the blog post linked above. If you don’t use digest authentication or any apps that do, it’s recommended you disable it from the Applications page.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to julian45 and rinsuki for having contributed to the code. Thanks to affronttonature, Anesidora, arsinclair, chirlu, DarkAdonis, jesus2099, julian45, Lotheric, practik, rinsuki, and wileyfoxyx for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to 7Stars, ApeKattQuest/MonkeyPython, Denatura, Early6431, EmO686, Flavia Telcean, GABG, Jeluang, JerryBest, KevinOpperman, LAY.JOSHI97, Lummerkurt, MFreedom89, Philipp Wolfer, ROManceJP, RalfZhang, The
ParaziT, afterthemagic, blueday, coffeeicus, cuhsy, jerry155756294, julian45, karpuzikov, meze, mfmeulenbelt, mr_monkey, salo.rock, sashimi3433, scientists360, silentbird, soonaf, sq, welikeheon, wileyfoxyx, and
zatto13 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2026-07-30.1.

MusicBrainz database schema change release, 2026-05-11 (with upgrade instructions)

We’re happy to announce the release of our May 2026 database schema change now! Thanks to all who were patient during Monday’s downtime as we released everything to our production servers.

This is a fairly small database schema change release which mostly improves things behind the scenes. Of the schema change tickets, the only one that affects users directly is you are most likely to notice while you browse and edit in MusicBrainz is MBS-14092 (which allows adding series of series, for example for award series for podcasts).

Thanks to chaban, UltimateRiff and yyb987 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements, and thanks to jmrr83, salo.rock and wileyfoxyx for updating the translations.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the (amended) release notes for update instructions.

Downtime for PostgreSQL / MusicBrainz schema change upgrade: Monday, May 11, 15:00 UTC

On Monday, May 11, at 15:00 UTC (8am PT, 11am ET, 5:00pm CEST), we’ll be:

Upgrading our production database server to PostgreSQL v18.
Performing the MusicBrainz schema version 31 upgrade.

See the previous announcement for more information.

We’ll be working to restore services as quickly as possible, but expect MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, and BookBrainz to be down for the hour. Thanks in advance for your patience!

Afterward, we’ll post instructions on the blog about how to upgrade your MusicBrainz mirror server.

MusicBrainz Server update, 2026-04-27

This release mostly consists of a very substantial rewrite of the external links editor code, to make that section of our editors more efficient. While doing that we also fixed a few long-standing links editor bugs. While we kept this code in beta for quite a while so the community could help us catch most new bugs, do not hesitate to report any issues you might find.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Thanks to rinsuki for having contributed to the code. Thanks to fabe56, HibiscusKazeneko and Lioncat6 for having reported bugs and suggested improvements. Thanks to Besnik, DenilsonSama, Khaled Salama, Marc Riera, ShimiDoki, Vaclovas Intas, cerberuzzz, coldified_, dddrnzv, dulijuong_artist, imgradeone, karpuzikov, mfmeulenbelt, salo.rock, smreo1590, syntariavoxmortem, wileyfoxyx and yyb987 for updating the translations. And thanks to all others who tested the beta version!

The git tag is v-2026-04-27.0.

MerchBrainz

We have added a range of great new MetaBrainz designs to our merch store: https://www.redbubble.com/people/metabrainz/shop

These designs by Monkey, previously only available to MetaBrainz summit attendees, have been lightly modified (summit-specific text removed) for everyday wear. Are many people going to know what you’re repping? No. Are the ones that do going to go “DAAAAAAAAAAAAMN IT’S THE BRAINZ YO”? Most definitely!

Schema change release: May 11, 2026

MusicBrainz is announcing a new schema change release set for May 11, 2026. Schema-wise, this release will be very light. At the same time, we’ll be requiring some major dependency upgrades to Perl, PostgreSQL, and Node.js. We’ll also be switching from Redis to Valkey in production. See below for more information.

The only breaking schema change is MBS-14252. It drops columns which are unused even in MusicBrainz Server, so should have little impact.

Here is the complete list of scheduled tickets:

Database schema

The following tickets change the database schema in some way.

MBS-6551: Database does not prevent a release from having duplicate label/catno pairs. This ticket involves replacing an index on the release_label table for additional data sanity. We’ll introduce a unique index on (release, label, catalog_number) (with NULL values treated as equal). This should have no impact on downstream users.
MBS-14092: Add support for series of series. This will allow connecting series that are related to each other in some way; for example, a series of series that have been honored with the same award, like the Golden Globe Award for Best Podcast. This involves adding a new series_series view, and replacing the allowed_series_entity_type constraint on the series_type table. It doesn’t modify or remove any other parts of the schema.
MBS-14252: Drop “source” column from iswc and isrc tables. As the title says, this drops the unused isrc.source and iswc.source columns from the database. Unless you’ve specifically referenced these columns in a query, this change should have no impact on you.

Server dependencies

MBS-14243: Upgrade the required version of Perl to 5.42. This is required as Perl 5.38 will no longer receive critical security fixes past July 2026.
MBS-14246: Upgrade the required version of PostgreSQL to 18. We last upgraded to PostgreSQL v16 two years ago, and would like to take advantage of the many performance advancements in PostgreSQL since then.

Note that the PGDG maintains an official APT repository for Debian and Ubuntu. PostgreSQL 18.3 is also available on Amazon RDS.

An upgrade script will be available for MusicBrainz Docker users with instructions provided at release time.
MBS-14244: Upgrade the required version of Node.js to 24. This is a straightforward upgrade to the latest LTS release, as Node.js v20 will soon be end-of-life.
MBS-14245: Switch from Redis to Valkey. Valkey is compatible with Redis OSS 7.2, and should be a drop-in replacement. There’s no reason to expect that Redis would stop working either. (The commands that MusicBrainz Server uses are very basic, and work even in Redis v3.)

Search server

SEARCH-756: Trigger reindex from dbmirror2 replication data. This drops the dependency on RabbitMQ and pg_amqp for live updating the Solr search indexes, and triggers the reindex process directly from PostgreSQL instead, by relying on the change data we already generate there for replication packets. If you run a local search indexer, this will simplify the setup/dependencies needed. Database-wise, it will require replacing triggers and creating a new “sir” schema.

We’ll post upgrade instructions for standalone/mirror servers on the day of the release. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or on the relevant above-linked tickets.