Episode 13: Elevating Musicians Through Open Source with Robert Kaye

Robert Kaye is the executive director of the MetaBrainz
Foundation, the legal umbrella for MusicBrainz. He got started in
the late 80’s and early 90’s hacking on some MP3 projects when
most of the world hadn’t heard of MP3. The metadata on MP3s was
terrible, so he started creating the database known as
MusicBrainz.


Robert talks about his business model for MusicBrainz. As time
has progressed, more and more people have access to a laptop and
cheap recording equipment. This constant churn of data gave them
the ability to play gatekeeper. Their goal was to take that data
and make it cleaner, better, and provide context. In 2003 they
started a service called Live Data Feed, which allows anyone to
set up a copy of MusicBrainz. Turning on Live Data Feed gets you
updates to your copy of MusicBrainz. The idea was to take the
recognition they had around Live Data Feed and created monetary
value from a service around timely and convenient packs of data.


In 2015, MusicBrainz realized that the actual value they had
wasn’t in the data, but in the community of people editing the
data took. So, they took a radical step and quit caring about
code licenses. Now, it is based off memberships with monthly fee.
This has worked spectacularly. They have taken to calling their
customers ‘supporters’, because if the database is going to stick
around then they need their support. 


BookBrainz is a similar project to the MusicBrainz database, but
applied to books. The project has grown large enough that Robert
had to hire a full time engineer to work on it. They deal with
disambiguation, deduplication, and conflicts in the 
metadata so that organizations like internet archives and Open
Library can build other tools on top.


For the past 4 years MetaBrainz has also been working on two
other projects. AcousticBrainz is machine learning analysis
applied to individual songs to determine what music sounds like.
It can determine acoustic characteristics such as male or female
vocals, presence of certain instruments, and beats per minute.
ListenBrainz tracks your listening history, similar to LastFM. In
fact, you can import your LastFM history into ListenBrainz and it
will do a metadata report on what you’ve listened to. Robert
notes that if you choose to learn ListenBrainz your data will be
public. These two projects form the perfect basis for building a
collaborative filtering algorithm and give you personalized
suggestions of what you may also like. They also have a program
to work with AcousticBrainz to track what you listen to and the
similarities between the songs. They are currently working on
compiling the data, but this open source project will enable
anyone to come in and create an open source music recommendation
engine. When building a recommendation engine, the idea is if
there’s a small/medium music label with one computer geek on
staff, they can get access to MusicBrainz and download their
recommendation engine and start getting their stuff out there,
and have it personalized to the listener.


Robert’s inspiration for these databases came from seeing a lot
more recommendation engines that are entirely biased and want to
push their content. He realized that these recommendation engines
were designed to feed money back into the system and keep
everyone inside the ‘walled garden’ of music. He got funding for
these projects through his good relationships with other
companies and because they were giving him the money for
MusicBrainz, which is enough money, so the extra money is
funneled towards other projects.


The MetaBrainz Foundation emphasizes quality of life for their
employees, and Robert and the panelists discuss how he reconciles
this quality of life versus the desire to get all this stuff out
the door. Robert believes that if you trust your team and empower
them to do what needs done, they will do their job. He only
really gets involved if it’s legal concerns, monetary issues, or
the rare high priority assignment. His company has few deadlines,
and he talks about how they organize their work. The panel
compares their experience working for other open source
companies. They discuss some of the drawbacks of remote work,
such as difficulty coordinating meetings and never really being
disconnected from work.


The show concludes with Robert talking about where he wants to
take MusicBrainz and MetaBrainz. His dream is to create more
tools for an improved music listening experience. His hidden
agenda is to get the small bands heard so that musicians can make
more money, elevating the artists in the world to be able to earn
a normal living. He hopes that by applying the concepts of open
source to the music industry, it will be cleaned up and all
musicians will get the exposure they deserve.
Panelists



Richard Littaur




Pia




With special guest: Robert Kaye
Sponsors



My Ruby Story




Elixir Mix




My Angular Story




Links




MetaBrainz Foundation




Napster




BookBrainz




AcousticBrainz




ListenBrainz




LastFM




Buffer




Open Collective




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Picks

Richard Littaur:




Brighde Chaimbeaul




Pia:




Snow Crush




The Robot Museum




Madrid Science and Technology Museum




Robert Kaye:




Passion by Peter Gabriel




Casa de Papel




Follow Robert @MayhemBCM and rob@metabrainz.org


Special Guest: Robert Kaye.