
A Subtle Power Struggle for Control of Music Metadata - acdanger
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/there-is-a-subtle-power-struggle-for-control-of-music-metadata
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femto
Is it really that subtle, given the long history of this struggle, and the
same names?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controvers...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controversy)

Given this context, surely the article should at least mention
[http://www.freedb.org/](http://www.freedb.org/) or
[https://musicbrainz.org/](https://musicbrainz.org/) ?

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Edit: Added musicbrainz

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cooper12
Why haven't more freely-licensed databases taken off in general? For movies,
IMDb (Internet Movie Database) is hugely popular and even lets its users edit,
but its data is proprietary. TMDb (The Movie Database) provides an API, but
its data is also proprietary and there's no way to download the data for
offline use. OMDb (The Open Movie Database) has an API and is licensed CC-BY
4.0, which is great, but also doesn't provide data dumps. Can you really say
it's an open database if users cannot redistribute your data or fork it? (Not
to mention that the users are the ones contributing most of the information)

What gives me hope though is that two databases you mentioned are freely-
licensed and do provide data dumps. This is essential for programmers to be
able to create things that rely on these databases. We need to establish more
free data stores, because as the article mentions, data is very valuable, and
as the Wikipedia links show, proprietary databases have absolute control over
their terms, restricting and locking out competition at any time.

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hamburglar
Musicbrainz is the db you are looking for. Not sure exactly why it hasn't
taken off like IMDb but movies and music and the kind of questions we ask
about them are very different things.

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mchahn
I have home SW that accesses TVDB.COM to get fan art, descriptions, etc., for
tv shows. Lately I have been getting 403s for requests. They won't say but I
assume they are getting takedowns for their metadata.

