MusicBrainz aims to be a comprehensive music database that will allow people and computers to have meaningful conversations about music. In order to facilitate these meaningful conversations, Music­Brainz needs to identify each artist, album, label and track with a unique identifier.

All IDs in Music­Brainz are UUIDs. For example: 95807106-af9f-417d-b1d0-d287c5504ec1

• Artist IDs:
  • These are unique IDs used to identify an artist. The absolute URI takes the form http://musicbrainz.org/artist/<UUID>
• Label IDs:
  • These are unique IDs used to identify a label. The absolute URI takes the form http://musicbrainz.org/label/<UUID>
• Release IDs:
  • These are unique IDs used to identify a release. The absolute URI takes the form http://musicbrainz.org/release/<UUID>
• Track IDs:
  • These are unique IDs used to identify a track. The absolute URI takes the form http://musicbrainz.org/track/<UUID>

These IDs are also stored in tags in music files by the MusicBrainz Tagger applications. See MusicBrainz Tag for more detailed information.

Special Identifiers

There are some special identifiers used by MusicBrainz.

• 89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377 is an artist ID used to represent various artists
• 1c6c63fb-f9af-4669-92c5-a1594671766a is an artist ID used to represent an artist not in the MusicBrainz database.

Other Identifiers used by MusicBrainz

• Disc ID:
  • An ID calculated from the TOC of a CD.
• PUID:
  • The IDs used in the proprietary MusicDNS audio fingerprinting system operated by MusicIP.
• TRM:
  • These IDs were used for the old Relatable audio fingerprinting system. These IDs are no longer used.