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MusicBrainz

The open music encyclopedia's read API, JSON on request

🎬 MediaHEALTHYchecked 3h ago
AUTH NONECORS ✓AGENT ✓HTTPS ✓COMMERCIAL ✓

MusicBrainz is a community-maintained database of artists, releases, and recordings, and its web service lets you look entities up by MBID (append ?fmt=json for JSON). Play nice: it asks for roughly one request per second and a descriptive User-Agent. Core data is CC0.

81HOW IT'S SCORED ⓘ
▶ Run liveDocs ↗
Status badge · for your READMEshipapis health badge: 81 · healthy
Uptime history
85.0%90 days
96.7%30 days
463P50 · ms
4770P95 · ms
operationalpartialdownno data
Response time · last 48 checks
Fastest 95 ms, slowest 4317 ms, most recent 134 ms.
Live response samplecaptured by our last successful check
GET https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/5b11f4ce-a62d-471e-81fc-a69a8278c7da?fmt=json

{
  "type": "Group",
  "id": "5b11f4ce-a62d-471e-81fc-a69a8278c7da",
  "name": "Nirvana",
  "sort-name": "Nirvana",
  "disambiguation": "1980s–1990s US grunge band",
  "country": "US",
  "life-span": {
    "begin": "1987",
    "end": "1994-04-05",
    "ended": true
  }
}
Call itcurl · fetch · python
curl "https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/5b11f4ce-a62d-471e-81fc-a69a8278c7da?fmt=json"
const res = await fetch("https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/5b11f4ce-a62d-471e-81fc-a69a8278c7da?fmt=json");
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data);
import requests

res = requests.get("https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/5b11f4ce-a62d-471e-81fc-a69a8278c7da?fmt=json")
print(res.json())
Endpoints · 3HealthyFULL DOCS ↗
Monitored path responding — GET /artist/5b11f4ce-a62d-471e-81fc-a69a8278c7da?fmt=json463 mschecked 3h ago
GET/artist/5b11f4ce-a62d-471e-81fc-a69a8278c7da?fmt=jsonPROBED

Artist record by MusicBrainz ID (Nirvana).

GET/release?query=release:nevermind&fmt=json

Search releases by title.

GET/recording?query=recording:smells+like+teen+spirit&fmt=json

Search recordings by title.

Machine-readable spec

We probe a documented GET and expect 2xx JSON — full uptime and health score. Export includes every documented route below.

Response-shape history

Stable. No schema drift observed since monitoring began — the response shape has not changed under our checks.

MusicBrainz: common questions

Is MusicBrainz free to use?

Yes — MusicBrainz is a free media API. Free tier: Free — no key required. Commercial use is allowed on the free tier.

Does MusicBrainz need an API key?

No — MusicBrainz needs no API key or signup. You can call it straight away; rate limits still apply (~1 request/second per IP; descriptive User-Agent required).

Can I call MusicBrainz from the browser?

Yes — MusicBrainz returns CORS headers over HTTPS, so front-end code can fetch it directly with no backend proxy. Use the fetch snippet on this page, or hit "Run live" to try it now.

Is MusicBrainz up right now?

As of our last scheduled check, MusicBrainz is healthy with 85.0% uptime over 90 days and a 463 ms median response. We re-probe it every sweep — the status badge and uptime chart above always show the latest.