Welcome to ListenBrainz!
The ListenBrainz project is similar to the original AudioScrobbler®. Unlike the original project, ListenBrainz is open source and will publish its data as open data.
A team of former Last.fm and current MusicBrainz hackers created the first version of ListenBrainz in the space of a weekend. Since the original project was created, technology has advanced at an incredibly rapid pace, which made re-creating the original project fairly straightforward.
The project has two main goals:
- Allow users to preserve their existing Last.fm® data. ListenBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation which has a long-standing history of curating, protecting and making data available to the public. MetaBrainz commits itself to safe-guarding the ListenBrainz data indefinitely.
- Make this incredibly useful music usage data available to anyone who cares to play with it. We hope that the combination of ListenBrainz, MusicBrainz and AcousticBrainz will provide enough data for developers to create new music recommendation systems. Music recommendation systems are hard to develop because comprehensive music data sets do not exist in the open. Normally start-ups spend vast amounts of money to create these data sets before building recommendation systems. We aim to short-cut this process and put the power to create recommendation engines into the hands of everyone. We plan to release the data under the CC0 License.
For more information about this project and its goals, please take a look at our goals page.
At this point the project is in its infancy -- we have lots of things that will need to be built and improved before this project will be useful to the general public. If you are a hacker and interested in helping out, please have a look at the code repository or come visit us in the #metabrainz IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.
