I’ve been building New Music Tracker, a site for discovering new album and EP releases. It’s built almost entirely on MetaBrainz and open music data, so wanted to share it here.
What it does:
Browse recent albums and EPs, filterable by genre, style, and release type
Fuzzy search across recordings, artists, and releases (local Meilisearch index of the MusicBrainz canonical dump)
Artist pages with discographies, release group pages with track listings
Follow artists to build a personalised feed of new releases
Import your top artists directly from your ListenBrainz profile
Wishlist albums to come back to later
Hand-curated featured releases on the home page
Data sources:
MusicBrainz — the entire catalog, enriched via a local mirror (mbslave)
Discogs — genre and style tags
ListenBrainz — popularity/listener counts
Cover Art Archive — artwork
Wikidata — artist images
No login required to browse. MusicBrainz OAuth unlocks following, wishlists, and ListenBrainz import.
Tech: Go with server-side rendering (templ + HTMX), PostgreSQL, local MusicBrainz mirror via mbslave, Meilisearch, NATS JetStream for background enrichment. Lightweight, fast, works without JS.
I’d love any feedback — especially from people who use ListenBrainz and care about open music data. The longer-term goal is a curator platform where people can publish playlists that sync to listeners’ streaming services, but right now it’s focused on discovery.
Is it possible that the personalised feed considers “Various Artists” as one specific artist and as a consequence shows all new Various Artists releases? I can’t really make sense of these recommendations… might actually be better to exclude them by default…
The hand-curated featured releases are nice, at least for this week I’m very happy with them.
Cool project! I like that it has MB wishlist integration (haven’t tested it yet but seems nice)
You might want to work on your genre tree though or are the genres that appear when clicking a main genre (rock, electronic, etc.) not meant to be subgenres of those? It’s funny seeing black metal, phonk , ambient and house under non-music (and hip hop) but not really expected. Unless it lists every genre that has an album that also has the main genre?
Oh, that explains it atleast better than half of the albums missing genres altogether when using MB for that…
Buttons that takes you to the MB page would be nice too, though that can easily be a userscript too. Gladly the URLs already have MBIDs
The genres I went back and forth on a bit, but settled on discogs for now. Like you say there are a lot of releases missing genre in MB. Discogs is generally quite good I think, but yes there are hip hop albums that are also tagged as black metal, which is strange.
If anyone knows of a better data source for genres please let me know
It’s surely a strange combination but according to Rate Your Music, which is a more accurate source for genre descriptions imo, there are a few that fit this description:
this is awesome! i’ll sign up at some point today. it’ll be nice having a place to easily discover new artists in specific genres.
my only “issue” would be that it seems your CDN (unpkg) employs data mining trackers. i use tracking blockers on all my devices so not a deal breaker for me, just something to consider. even if it’s for telemetry and not malicious, there is too much room for abuse with no reward for the person having their data stored.
i’m far from knowledgeable on these sorts of things, so I could be wrong, but it seems like it may also invalidate your privacy policy:
Thanks for raising this @victimless-grime
I was indeed grabbing the HTMX js lib from the unpkg CDN, which means a request to a third party. This is at odds with the privacy stance. I was meant to move this to self host, which I’ve now just done.
Glad you like the genre browsing! Let me know if you have more feedback as you try it out
Where is it getting the genres for this from? breakcore, harsh noise wall, glitch, idm, industrial and musique concrète?
I couldn’t find it on discogs, but i was slightly disappointed to see bandcamp + musicbrainz have tags like folk rock, post-punk and singer-songwriter (though these genres are cool too of course…)
When genres were first added for that release it didn’t exist yet on discogs, so took the next closest match (I do a search in discogs if there’s no discogs URL for it yet in MB). Then when it was added to Discogs the genres from the correct release got appended. So it’s a combination of genres and styles from 2 different albums.
I’ve made a couple of fixes:
Make sure we have a close enough match for the search, so it doesn’t match against the wrong release
Always replace the genres rather than append
That was quite the mix of genres it ended up with! Thanks for reporting this @RandomMushroom128
Thanks for the quick fix! So it does exist on discogs, I just searched for the album title and it didn’t appear lol, but when adding the artist name in the search it does.
This was the closest match? (searched for releases matching all those styles) 1577 tracks, that’s more like it it does have 2 tracks one has “music for” and one has “frogs” in the title
or are the genres that appear when clicking a main genre (rock, electronic, etc.) not meant to be subgenres of those? It’s funny seeing black metal, phonk , ambient and house under non-music (and hip hop) but not really expected. Unless it lists every genre that has an album that also has the main genre?
atleast better than half of the albums missing genres altogether when using MB for that…
(though these genres are cool too of course…)
