MusicBrainz is a community-maintained open source encyclopedia of music information.

This means that anyone - including you - can help contribute to the project by adding information about your favorite artists and their related works.

In 2000, Gracenote took over the free CDDB project and commercialized it, essentially charging users for access to the very data they had themselves contributed. In response, Robert Kaye founded MusicBrainz. The project has since grown rapidly from a one-man operation to an international community of enthusiasts who appreciate both music and music metadata. Along the way, the scope of the project has expanded from its origins as a mere a CDDB replacement to today, where MusicBrainz has become a true encyclopedia of music.

As an encyclopedia and as a community, MusicBrainz exists solely to collect as much information about music as we can. We do not discriminate or prefer one "type" of music over another though, in fact we collect information about as many different types of music as possible. Whether it is published/unpublished, popular/fringe, western/non-western, human/non-human - we want it all to be entered into MusicBrainz.
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