MusicBrainz is a public, editable database of music metadata, run by the MetaBrainz Foundation and maintained by volunteers. Its data is free to use, which is why it turns up inside software that never mentions it by name.
What it holds
- Artists, with aliases, members and the relationships between them.
- Release groups, releases and individual tracks.
- Identifiers: ISNI, ISRC and IPI, plus links to Discogs, Wikidata and Spotify.
- Every edit, with who made it and when.
Who reads it
Media players and taggers such as Picard, library and streaming software, research projects, and commercial services that need a stable artist identity to hang data on. An entry here often becomes the machine-readable version of an artist across several systems at once.
Why an artist should check it
Anyone can create an entry, and mistakes propagate. A wrong year, a duplicate artist page splitting one discography in two, or a release credited to a similarly named artist all spread to whatever reads the database. Other editors review changes, so a correction takes a few days rather than being instant.