What Achordion is

Achordion is the independent music community and data layer. Parachord is the player. Together they're the open-source counterpoint to Spotify / Apple Music — where the community, the data, and the playback are tangled inside a walled garden. Here those three layers are separate, open, and yours.

Achordion mirrors every functional page that listenbrainz.org offers — listens, stats, charts, fresh releases, the user feed, Year in Music, LB Radio, Critical Darlings — with a fresh visual language and cleaner information architecture. Parachord plays whatever you click. They're built to feel like one product across desktop, mobile, and web.

ListenBrainz is the open-source, MetaBrainz-run alternative to last.fm — and it's great. But its UI hasn't had the love its data deserves. Achordion is an attempt to give that data a home that's easy to spend time in: cleaner reading, denser browsing, every artist / album / track one click away, and zero friction between "I see something I like" and "I'm playing it."

That last part is where Parachord comes in. Every playable thing on Achordion — every track row, every album cover, every chart entry, every Critical Darling, every "now playing" pin in a friend's feed — has a parachord://deep link that hands the tracklist to Parachord without disrupting your library. Parachord wakes if it isn't running, plays the track, and routes through whichever streaming service or local source the listener is set up with.

1. An open community for listeners, regardless of which streaming service they use. Today Spotify users, Apple Music users, Tidal users, Bandcamp die-hards, and the people on a NAS full of FLACs all live in separate silos — none of them can see what the others are listening to. Achordion is the place where that wall comes down: every listener's scrobbles flow into the same feed regardless of where the music actually came from. Discover what your friend is playing this week even if she's on Apple Music and you're on Spotify.
2. A modern, generously-designed UI on top of ListenBrainz and MusicBrainz. The data that the MetaBrainz Foundation has built is extraordinary; the front-end shouldn't be the limiting factor in spending time with it. We want the experience to feel as polished as the proprietary services people are migrating from — without the proprietary catches.
3. A push for the open-source music database to keep growing. Every "+ Add sources" tile, every breadcrumb deep-linked back to MusicBrainz, every chart that points users into the canonical entity page is a small nudge toward editing MB. The more people who can find a missing relationship and fix it in one click, the better the open data gets — and the better Achordion (and every other MB client) gets for free.
4. User-owned data, full portability, and listening insights you can see all year. Your data lives in your ListenBrainz / MusicBrainz accounts, not Achordion's. Export anywhere, point any client at the same accounts, leave whenever. And the listening visualizations — the charts, the heatmaps, the top-X breakdowns, the year-in-music style summaries — shouldn't only show up once a year on a single proprietary platform's schedule. Your habits are interesting all the time; the views to explore them should be available all the time.

Today an artist who wants to understand their audience has to log into Spotify for Artists, Apple Music for Artists, YouTube Studio, Bandcamp's artist dashboard, and a handful of others — each showing only the slice of fans on that one platform. The full picture lives nowhere.

Because ListenBrainz collects scrobbles across services, and because Parachord scrobbles every play regardless of where the audio came from, an artist's page on Achordion shows the whole audience in one place: who their top listeners are, how many people are spinning each release, which tracks are getting traction, which cities the listening is coming from. One view, not seven tabs — and the data the artist sees is exactly the data their fans see. No black-box weighting, no platform- specific dark patterns.

The same affordance works for fans curious about an artist's reach. If you discover a small band on Bandcamp and want to know how many people are seriously into them across the whole listening community, the answer's on their Achordion page rather than scattered across half a dozen platform-specific stats pages.

Achordion is stateless. It doesn't see, store, or own your listening data in any way. There's no Achordion database, no Achordion analytics, no Achordion-side profile of you. When you sign in, Achordion authenticates you against MusicBrainz and then queries your data live from ListenBrainz on each page view — the same way opening listenbrainz.org would.

Your listens, loves, pins, follows, playlists, and stats all live in your ListenBrainz account, run by the MetaBrainz Foundation. Your identity lives at MusicBrainz. If Achordion disappeared tomorrow, none of your data would go with it — you'd just point a different ListenBrainz client at the same account and pick up where you left off.

Parachord aggregates playback across Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube Music, Bandcamp, Tidal, and your local files behind a single resolver. Click "Play in Parachord" from Achordion and Parachord:

1. Resolves the track against every authorized source.
2. Picks the best match using a priority + confidence scoring system — your preferred services first, with a confidence floor that filters out wrong-song matches.
3. Plays through that source: Spotify Connect, MusicKit JS, ExoPlayer for local / SoundCloud, etc.

You control the priority order; Achordion just hands over the tracklist.

Parachord scrobbles every play to ListenBrainz, Last.fm, and Libre.fm simultaneously, with full MBID enrichment so listens carry the canonical MusicBrainz identifiers (recording, release, artist) — not just freeform strings. ISRCs and durations come along too. Your Achordion view updates in near-real-time as Parachord scrobbles whatever you play.

If you scrobble from somewhere else — Spotify direct, Pano Scrobbler on Android, NepTunes on a Mac, the Web Scrobbler browser extension — Achordion still reflects the activity through ListenBrainz.

MusicBrainz for canonical music metadata and identity (sign in is the same MB account ListenBrainz uses). ListenBrainz for listen history, stats, and recommendations. Cover Art Archive for, well, cover art. Wikidata + Wikimedia Commons for artist photos. And occasional editorial feeds — Apple Music charts, !earshot college-radio charts, Critical Darlings — to round out the discovery surface.

None of that infrastructure is mine. The MetaBrainz Foundation runs MusicBrainz and ListenBrainz on donations and a small team. If you get value from Achordion, please support them.

Achordion and Parachord are both made by J Herskowitz. Both projects are open source and gladly accept issues / PRs:

• github.com/jherskowitz/achordion
• github.com/Parachord/parachord
• github.com/jherskowitz/spinbin — public-radio playlist scraper that powers the Radio Rewinds tab.