Data licenses

Before you read this page, we encourage you to read the MusicBrainz data license page to give you an overview of the MusicBrainz data and the licenses that apply to the data.

Data snapshots

The data snapshots (full exports) of the MusicBrainz data are generated twice a week and can be downloaded from MusicBrainz. The MusicBrainz data license page outlines the nitty gritty details of what you can do with these data snapshots, so we encourage you to read our MusicBrainz data license page.

The data is organized so that the most useful data is available in the Public Domain. This means that you can do anything with the core data -- no restrictions, no need to ask for permission -- please go download a copy today! The ancillary data such as the search indexes and the moderation (edits to the database) are less useful outside of the MusicBrainz context and therefore are licensed under a Creative Commons license.

As long as you don't need to have the data kept up to date, we suspect that the Public Domain data will suffice for our users and that no commercial licenses will be necessary. However, if you need data that is constantly updated, then read on for the live data feed.

Take a look at which companies have taken a license to the MusicBrainz data.

Live data-feed

The live data-feed enables a server running a PostgreSQL database in conjunction with the MusicBrainz server software to automatically stay in synch with the main server. A mirror (slave) server starts off with the latest data snapshot and then downloads replication packets from the main MusicBrainz FTP site at hourly intervals and applies them to the local database. This enables the mirror server to never be more than about an hour of sync with the main server.

The live data-feed is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. This allows free non-commerical use of the live data-feed. Commercial users will need to contact the MetaBrainz Foundation to arrange for a commercial use license for the live data feed.

For commercial use, the data must be hosted by the company that wishes to use the data for their own products. This puts all reliability/availability issues into the hands of the commercial user, so that the user can ensure the proper availability of the data for their own customers. The MetaBrainz Foundation currently does not offer services to host the data for commercial customers

What constitutes non-commercial and commercial use?

The Creative Commons license defines non-commercial use as:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

This definition is very much in favor of categorizing as any use that involves any money as commercial. We do not interpret the license quite so strictly. For instance, if you have banner ads on your site in hopes to cover your bandwidth costs, but you don't charge for anything else on your site, we don't consider that commercial use. We are still working with the Creative Commons to define a clear set of uses that would be considered non-commercial and a set of uses that would be considered commercial. In the near future we hope to document the clear-cut cases here on the site and then decide other cases that fall in-between on a case by case basis.

For now, if you have questions about commercial use, please contact us