Goals

The ListenBrainz project has a number of goals:

  1. A public store of your listen history. We feel that a listen history has a tremendous amount of personal value and in aggregate has a huge amount of value for developers who wish to create better music technologies, like recommendation systems.
  2. A permanent store of your listen history. MetaBrainz, the non-profit that runs MusicBrainz and ListenBrainz has a long history of curating and making data available to the public in a useful and meaningful manner. We promise to safeguard your listen history permanently.
  3. To make data dumps of this listen history available for download. We want everyone who is interested in this data to have access to the data and to use it in any manner they wish.
  4. To share listen histories in a distributed fashion. We plan to allow anyone to connect to ListenBrainz and to tap into a live feed of listen data as we receive it. We hope that Last.fm will work with us to make an interconnection with Last.fm possible. We welcome anyone scrobbling to us and we plan to share the listens shared with us to anyone else who wants them. We envision smaller music communities with a specific focus to install their own ListenBrainz server to collect listen data for their specific focus. We hope that these smaller communities will also share their data in the same manner in which we share our data.

Anti-goals

The project also has a number of anti-goals (things it doesn't try to be):

  1. A store for people's private listen history. The point of this project is to build a public, shareable store of listen data. As we build out our sharing features, building a private listen store will become possible, but that is not part of our goals.
  2. A closed platform. We aim to make everything open and to encourage a community of sharing and participation.

Roadmap

We've put together a very rough roadmap for this project:

Short term

  • Work to improve and extend the user data graphing features.

Medium term

Long term

  • Total world domination. What other goals are open source projects allowed to have?

If you have any ideas that should be on our roadmap, please let us know!

Contributing to ListenBrainz

Donating

Listenbrainz is a free open source project that is not run for profit. If you would like to help the project out financially, consider donating to the MetaBrainz Foundation.

Developers

ListenBrainz is in its infancy and we need a lot of help to implement more features and to debug the existing features. If you feel like helping out and have experience with Python, Postgres and Redis, we'd love some help.

Have a look at the GitHub repository for this project to get started. You may also consider heading to our IRC channel #metabrainz on irc.libera.chat and asking people there what should be worked on next. Finally, we also have a bug tracker that keeps track of our current issues.