Mass-Add ISRCs

MusicBrainz
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1

Since Anna’s Archive just published most of Spotifys metadata ( Backing up Spotify - Anna’s Blog ), it is possible to identify missing ISRCs that are available on mass locally using a few database queries (using a db dump for MB).

During my time of going through existing releases with harmony, I’ve noticed quite a few releases that have Spotify links but that don’t have associated ISRCs added.

Would it be desirable to mass identify them, and then add them to MB?

2 Likes
2

If you do plausibility checks (matching title, length, etc.) and/or the recordings are unique to that release, why not?

3

Hopefully people won’t associate MB with piracy archives like Anna Archive due to news articles comparing the two (as if I didn’t know what MB was, based on the articles, I’d think it’s a source for pirated music, instead of it being a Music Metadata DB):

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4

This is the first thing I thought of when I first saw the news. I’m very new to the MusicBrainz community, but it has been integral to my own exodus from Spotify in combination with Funkwhale. I don’t have much experience, but I’d love to help however I can with this process.

5

This part annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_metadata.torrent/spotify_clean.sqlite3 could be interesting for MB?

 CREATE TABLE `tracks` (
          `rowid` integer PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
          /* The original Spotify base62 ID. */
          `id` text NOT NULL,
          /* When the item was fetched (unixepoch ms). */
          `fetched_at` integer NOT NULL,
          /* "The name of the track." */
          `name` text NOT NULL,
          /* "A link to a 30 second preview (MP3 format) of the track. Can be null" */
          `preview_url` text,
          `album_rowid` integer NOT NULL,
          /* "The number of the track. If an album has several discs, the track number is the number on the specified disc." */
          `track_number` integer NOT NULL,
          /* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recording_Code */
          `external_id_isrc` text,   <----- MB?
          `external_id_ean` text,    <----- MB?
          `external_id_upc` text,    <----- MB?
...

I have no idea how legal this would be, given that it seems Anna’s Archive does not actually have the needed rights to “backup” Spotify.

6

Yes, that is the part I’d be interested in automatically using.
As for legality. IANAL, but I’d say that it is similar to what other tools like Harmony are already doing.

All this information is available using the API (unlike the music files they plan to share later)

7

To that its not helpful that people seem to somehow think that MusicBrainz=Spotify, it does not it’s not SpotifyBrainz - we catalogue the metadata for a lot more music than that which just appears on streaming platforms.

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