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
qualitysearch field. - SEARCH-752: Relationships have an extra ‘target’ property in JSON output. Fixing it by removing the redundant property
targetwill be a breaking change if you are accessing it in search results. The “proper” way to do this is to use the propertytarget-typeand access the propertyidunder 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.