Building MusicTrends on Open Music Data
A new MusicTrends.net update went live today that makes it easier for ListenBrainz users to get started exploring their listening history.
MusicTrends now supports ListenBrainz's new user data export. Add your ListenBrainz user token to your MusicTrends account, and we'll request your listening-history export and process it in the background.
But this release also feels like a good opportunity to say thank you to the people behind the data that makes projects like MusicTrends possible.
MusicTrends and the MetaBrainz ecosystem
ListenBrainz is part of the broader MetaBrainz community, which also includes MusicBrainz.
MusicTrends relies heavily on both.
ListenBrainz gives people an open place to collect and access their listening history. MusicBrainz provides a huge amount of the music metadata MusicTrends uses to understand the artists, releases, recordings, and relationships behind those listens.
Together, those projects make it possible for an independent project like MusicTrends to spend less time recreating foundational music data and more time asking interesting questions of it.
When did you discover an artist? How has your listening changed over time? What decades dominate your library? Which artists disappeared and later came back?
Those are the kinds of things I want MusicTrends to explore.
Making the data easier to use
The new ListenBrainz export support is a great example of why I've enjoyed building within this ecosystem.
Someone with years of listening history may have tens or hundreds of thousands of listens. Rather than requiring MusicTrends to retrieve all of that history through thousands of individual API requests, ListenBrainz can now prepare the user's history as an export that MusicTrends can process directly.
It's better for ListenBrainz, better for MusicTrends, and much simpler for the person using both.
More importantly, it's another example of the MetaBrainz community making music data accessible in ways that allow other people to build new things with it.
MusicTrends wouldn't be what it is today without that work.
So, thank you to everyone contributing to MetaBrainz, MusicBrainz, and ListenBrainz for building and maintaining the open music-data infrastructure that makes projects like this possible.
If you're already using ListenBrainz, the new import process is live now:
And if you're interested in the projects behind much of the data MusicTrends uses:
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