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Robert Kaye (back)
Originally uploaded by wmf.

If you are in London tomorrow, head on over to Queen Mary, University of London. Robert Kaye, founder and mayhem master at MusicBrainz is giving a seminar at the Center for Digital Music at Queen Mary. Friday 4pm, June 1, Electronic Engineering Department, Mile End Road, E1 4NS. Rumor is that Robert will have his hair shaved to form a map of the entire London Underground.

Maybe after that Robert can head on over to Last.fm to convince the guys there to finish the hookup with MusicBrainz with all that nifty new CBS money.

Update:(via Steve Welburn)  Here's a nifty abstract for the talk:

GraceNote has built a walled garden of music metadata by stealing data from the commons. Music metadata holds the key to efficient communication about music on the internet; locking up this data in a walled garden hampers the further evolution of the music industry. Robert Kaye will talk about MusicBrainz, and open source/data project to build a music encyclopedia that actively works to create a music metadata commons on the Internet. The seminar will cover the future of MusicBrainz and MetaBrainz Foundation and how MusicBrainz aims to establish a Lingua Franca for unambiguous communication about music. Find out how MusicBrainz and MusicIP create a level playing field that allows everyone to participate in efficient communication and classification of music.

Update 2:

This talk is now available online at http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/seminars/