The BBC is currently working in partnership with Music Brainz – the world’s largest public domain music database, which currently lists 8 million tracks by half a million different artists. The eventual goal is to create and maintain an artist page for every performer whose music is played on BBC radio and television. The front end for this hugely ambitious project is already up and running at bbc.co.uk/music although this is still officially only a beta version of the system.

The tracklist pages of all BBC music radio shows are currently being upgraded. For every artist played there will soon be a clickable link to their page on the bbc.co.uk/music website. And the song information on these pages is all taken from the Music Brainz database. Here’s an example.

However this means it’s now really important for independent artists to get their recordings listed on Music Brainz. Otherwise whenever you’re played on BBC radio the tracklisting will either point at an empty page like this one or else not point at anything at all (see the non-clickable entries on this recent tracklist for Gideon Coe).

Unfortunately, entering data on the Music Brainz website can be pretty daunting, so we’ve put together a step-by-step guide on our main BBC 6 Music Introducing page, to help artists do it for themselves.

Take a look, give it a try and let us know how you get on. Music Brainz is used not only by the BBC but also by Last.fm and other music discovery sites – it’s going to be increasingly important for artists to get their recordings and biog metadata accurately listed there. If you can suggest improvements to our guide – or have any other thoughts on the subject generally – we’d love to have your comments…