Establish recording-level rights clearance

Establish recording-level rights clearance for the 500 recordings and their associated annotations before publicly releasing the Music Understanding Benchmark.

Background

The benchmark withholds audio and removes explicit recording identities, but anonymization does not establish permission to use the recordings or redistribute their annotations. The selected recordings were not subjected to recording-level licence verification, copyright-risk ranking, or an annotation-rights gate. A rights-cleared public release therefore remains unresolved.

References

We identify important limitations, including an asymmetric legacy key metric, unverified independent annotation agreement, extreme metre imbalance, and unresolved recording-level rights clearance.

— MUB: An Identity-Masked Benchmark for Music Understanding in Multimodal Language Models  (2610.22989 - Liu et al., 16 Oct 2026) in Abstract; Section 6, paragraph “Rights are not established by anonymization.”