I've been at it for a while, but I've spent much of the early parts of July adding Twitch musicians to MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz is a crowdsourced database of music, collecting metadata like releases, titles, release dates, artists, and URLs for streaming services and artists' social media pages. It is not a streaming service, nor does it host any music files.

Twitch musicians are underrepresented on MusicBrainz, from what I can observe, and from the many anecdotes of seeing a stream in my front page recommendations and being unable to find them at all.

I've put the musicians I found and/or added to a public collection, and I hope that it grows over the months. (Minor note: people known more for the band they're part of will have their band added, not the person themselves. For example, Marianna Thielen and Reece Marshburn are better known as The Bylines.)

Why do this?

This section is for my personal motivations behind this project. For how it benefits others, and streamers, scroll down to What's in it for the streamers?.

I discovered the Twitch music community in January 2023, and since then I've been an active part of it. As a_random_lemurian, I can be observed lurking and chatting in some channels, from time to time.

I also believe in the value of archiving (almost) everything. Everyday, countless amounts of good vibes flow through Twitch and memories get made. Twitch's VOD retention is awfully short, but that's not the topic of this article.

And MusicBrainz, with its crowdsourced nature and its openness to virtually anyone like me, allows people passionate about their own niche interests within something as broad and general as music, and Twitch music, to contribute what they know, about the streamers and the songs they love. The history of Twitch music is history worth preserving, and worth saving

What is MusicBrainz?

MusicBrainz can describe themselves in better words than I can, so I will quote them here.

MusicBrainz is an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public.

MusicBrainz aims to be:

  • The ultimate source of music information by allowing anyone to contribute and releasing the data under open licenses.

  • The universal lingua franca for music by providing a reliable and unambiguous form of music identification, enabling both people and machines to have meaningful conversations about music.

Like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz is maintained by a global community of users and we want everyone — including you — to participate and contribute.

MusicBrainz is operated by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation dedicated to keeping MusicBrainz free and open source.

(view original; CC0)

As for the types of data in MusicBrainz, here is my attempt at explaining them.

A work is a song, and a recording is a particular performance of that song. If you upload a video of yourself singing the song, that is a recording. If you release it on Bandcamp or other streaming services and the audio is different, it's another recording of the same work.

Releases are grouped into release groups. In practice, most release groups will only have one release; release groups exist for other musicians in MusicBrainz that have released and re-released their music in a variety of different formats.

MusicBrainz is extremely broad in what they will include; just uploading a video of yourself singing your originals to YouTube counts. In general, if you have any durably archived recordings online of your songs, you're eligible for inclusion. If you haven't made any music but have helped with recording or any of the other tasks in the music production process, you will also be added so that you can be credited for your role in the music.

I do of course, have some personal limits with what I will include in MusicBrainz.

If videos of your performances are locked behind paywalls, Patreon, or are unlisted, they will not be added. Even though MusicBrainz does not host any music files, I will still interpret this as your wishes, and respect them. Additionally, I prefer that when I add a particular work to MusicBrainz that there is a YouTube link to the performance or some other durable link, which isn't the case with this.

Covers of non-Twitch songs will mostly not be included to prevent overrunning the database with excessive amounts of them. I haven't ironed this out yet. Covers uploaded of other Twitch streamers' songs however, will be included. Whether a song is "Twitch" or not is a spectrum, not two buckets, and can differ based on perception and person.

As I learn more about the rules, regulations, and norms of MusicBrainz, this will change.

What's in it for the streamers?

Being added to MusicBrainz is free, and because it is open data, many websites and search engines use MusicBrainz data to enrich their pages and results

Additionally, there exists MusicBrainz Picard, which helps people match music files on their computers to entries in the database, allowing for better and more detailed metadata.

Furthermore, it improves discoverability too. Because I have a collection of MusicBrainz listing Twitch musicians, anyone is free to browse through the list and find someone they might like. And people can create their own lists too with an account for particular ones they like.

Oh, and you can help too! Anyone can; because as I've said earlier, MusicBrainz is open.

Will you join us? You don't have to, of course.