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MusicBrainz website screenshot

MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz is an open-source, community-maintained music encyclopedia operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a US 501(c)(3) non-profit. It collects metadata about artists, releases, recordings, works, labels, places, areas, events, instruments, series, URLs, and the relationships between them, then exposes the catalog through a free public REST web service at https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/. The dataset itself is released under CC0 (core data) and CC-BY-NC-SA (supplemental tables), the schema is open, and full database dumps and a live replication feed are available. The web service is read-mostly with authenticated submission endpoints for tags, ratings, collections, barcodes, and ISRCs, and is rate-limited to one request per IP per second with a mandatory descriptive User-Agent header.

agent ready

Solid contracts, transparent operations, and an easy start — typically complete on four or five facets with one clear soft spot.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles MusicBrainz the way a machine reads it — 36 machine-readable artifacts across 16 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — MusicBrainz scores 60.7/100 (strong), with a separate agent-readiness read of 48/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 60.7/100 · strong
Contract Quality 18.9 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 5.7 / 20
Commercial Clarity 10.5 / 20
Operational Transparency 4.8 / 13
Governance 8.8 / 12
Discoverability 9.3 / 10
Regulatory · Government & Public Sector 11.4 / 15
Agent readiness — 48/100 · agent ready
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile MusicBrainz

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for MusicBrainz. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 16

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

MusicBrainz Areas API

Lookup, browse, and search for geographic areas (countries, cities, etc.).

MusicBrainz Artists API

Lookup, browse, and search for artists (people, bands, orchestras).

MusicBrainz Collections API

Authenticated user collections of entities.

MusicBrainz Events API

Lookup, browse, and search for music events (concerts, festivals, etc.).

MusicBrainz Genres API

List the curated genre taxonomy.

MusicBrainz Identifiers API

Non-MBID lookups by ISRC, ISWC, and DiscID.

MusicBrainz Instruments API

Lookup and search for instruments used in recordings.

MusicBrainz Labels API

Lookup, browse, and search for record labels.

MusicBrainz Places API

Lookup, browse, and search for places (venues, studios, etc.).

MusicBrainz Recordings API

Lookup, browse, and search for recordings (distinct audio captures of a performance).

MusicBrainz Release Groups API

Lookup, browse, and search for release groups (logical grouping of releases).

MusicBrainz Releases API

Lookup, browse, and search for releases (specific issues of an album).

MusicBrainz Series API

Lookup, browse, and search for series (ordered groups of entities).

MusicBrainz Submission API

Authenticated submission of tags, ratings, barcodes, and ISRCs.

MusicBrainz URLs API

Lookup URLs linked to other MusicBrainz entities.

MusicBrainz Works API

Lookup, browse, and search for musical works (abstract compositions).

Scroll within the panel for all 16 ·

Open Collections 1

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

GraphQL 1

Where a provider ships GraphQL, the schema is the contract. We profile it alongside the REST surface so the whole interface is legible in one place.

GraphQL schemas published by this provider.

MusicBrainz GraphQL API

MusicBrainz is an open music encyclopedia. The API covers artist lookups, recording metadata, releases and release groups, labels, works, places, events, instruments, series, an...

GRAPHQL

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Musicbrainz Rate Limits

4 limits

RATE LIMITS

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Musicbrainz Context

88 classes · 7 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 2

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

MusicBrainz API Rules

6 rules · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

MusicBrainz API Rules

22 rules · 10 errors · 9 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 4

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

MusicBrainz Artist

19 properties

JSON SCHEMA

MusicBrainz Recording

12 properties

JSON SCHEMA

MusicBrainz Release

20 properties

JSON SCHEMA

MusicBrainz Work

12 properties

JSON SCHEMA

JSON Structure 1

JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.

JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.

Musicbrainz Artist Structure

0 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Examples 4

Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.

Example request and response payloads for these APIs.

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Musicbrainz Authentication

http/oauth2 · 2 schemes

SECURITY

Musicbrainz Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · DMARC

SECURITY

Scopes 1

OAuth scopes are the vocabulary of least-privilege access. Profiling them shows exactly what an integration — or an agent acting on a user's behalf — is allowed to do.

OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.

Musicbrainz Scopes

7 scopes · authorizationCode

7 scopes

SCOPES

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Musicbrainz Agentic Access

36 operations · 6 acting

36 operations · 6 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for MusicBrainz — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Documentation 3

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Operate 2

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Commercial 3

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

Company 2

The organization behind the API

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/musicbrainz · machine-readable index on apis.io