MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz is an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public. It is a community-maintained, open source database maintained by a global community of users where anyone can contribute information about artists, releases, works and composers.

Yes, the majority of the data in the MusicBrainz Database is released into the Public Domain and can be downloaded and used for free. Most data is published under the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal license, though some remaining data is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0. All data is also available for commercial licensing.

No, MusicBrainz does not store or have access to any music recordings. It only stores metadata about music such as artist information, releases, works and composer data.

There are multiple ways to use MusicBrainz depending on your needs. If you have a digital music collection, you can use the free MusicBrainz Picard file tagging application. Software developers can use developer resources and APIs to create their own applications. Commercial users can access the live data feed for database replication, and music fans can contribute data to the database.

MusicBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source.