MetaBrainz

MetaBrainz Foundation is a United States–based non-profit organization that coordinates a family of open data projects centered on music and media metadata. It provides hosting, infrastructure, governance, and funding to support community-driven databases and services that aim to make cultural data freely accessible and machine-readable.

Its flagship project is MusicBrainz, a community-edited database of music metadata. Other core projects include AcousticBrainz, which captures audio features and fingerprints for tracks; ListenBrainz, a platform for collecting and analyzing users’ listening histories; CritiqueBrainz, a project for cataloging and rating music reviews; and BookBrainz, a metadata project for books. The organization emphasizes interoperability and cross-linking among these resources to enable research, discovery, and application development.

Governance is distributed among volunteer contributors and a board of directors, and the Foundation relies on donations, sponsorships, and grants to sustain operations. All projects operate with open licenses and community governance to ensure transparency, inclusivity, and long-term availability of the data.

MetaBrainz positions itself as part of the broader open data movement, hosting projects that are used by developers, researchers, librarians, and music enthusiasts. By providing open, community-curated metadata, it supports metadata quality improvements and innovation in music and media applications.