Musicbrainz for The World: The Chilean Experience

In this paper we present our research in gathering data from several semi-structured collections of cultural heritage— Chilean music-related websites—and uploading the data into an open-source music database, where the data can be easily searched, discovered, and interlinked. This paper also reviews the characteristics of four user-contributed, music metadatabases (MusicBrainz, Discogs, MusicMoz, and FreeDB), and explains why we chose MusicBrainz as the repository for our data. We also explain how we collected data from the five most important sources of Chilean music-related data, and we give details about the context, design, and results of an experiment for artist name comparison to verify which of the artists that we have in our database exist in the MusicBrainz database already. Although it represents a single case study, we believe this information will be of great help to other MIR researchers who are trying to design their own studies of world music.