A directory of web services for music discovery

(Most recent update: May 24, 2006)

In this 'web 2.0' world, people like to make mashups by making a web app that combines the data of two or more web services (note this shouldn't be confused with music mashups).  There are plenty of music sites out there that provide public APIs that can be used for all sorts of purposes (for MIR researchers looking for music data, for web 2.0 developers trying to make the next killer music app, or  the hobbyist, just for doing fun things).   Here are some of my favorites:

  • Amazon web services - a great place to go to collect all sorts of music metadata, including album art, editorial and customer reviews, track lists, popularity, similar items, release dates and all that.  It is possible to crawl through the amazon catalog and collect information on thousands and thousands of CDs (and books and DVDs for that matter) in the course of a week or so (Amazon does request that you limit your requests to no more than one per second).
  • MusicMobs - MusicMobs is playlist sharing and social tagging / recommendation music site.  The site is built entirely on top of its  public webservices API. This means that anything that MusicMobs can do with their data, you can do to. The have services for getting playlists, finding  info about different artists, exploring the social tags applied by users.  The documentation is not necessarily up-to-date but Toby (the site operator) is always ready to help.
  • MusicStrands -  MusicStrands is a social recommendation / discovery site.  They've just released their first public version of OpenStrands, their web services API. This API includes catalog, recommendation playlist, tagging and community services (and it's free to registered users).
  • last.fm - last.fm is probably the 'king' of the social recommenders out there.  Last.fm (via AudioScrobbler) provides an API for getting user, artist, tag and group data.  Here's an example of using the similar artists service.
  • MusicBrainz - MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase. They provide web  services for all of the information in the database including artists, albums and tracks. MusicBrainz establishes a unique MusicBrainz ID for each track in its database (using MusicDNS fingerprinting technology).
  • MusicDNS -  which is run MusicIP (formerly Predixis)  provides a music fingerprinting service that works with MusicBrainz.
  • Rhapsody.com - Rhapsody is a music subscription service. The provide a number of RSS feeds that report top artists and albums as well as new releases, links to album art, track IDs (useful for playing the audio)
  • WebJay  (now part of yahoo). A playlist sharing site.  Webjay provides APIs for creating, modifying and retrieving playlists.
  • AOL Music- AOL music provides RSS feeds for their 'charts' such as the top songs, aritst, albums and playlists.
  • Mp3Tunes - Mp3Tunes is a music locker, a place for people to store their music online so they can access it anywhere (at home, at work, on vacation), without needing to carry it.  They also have an index of about 50,000 songs that are freely available on the net (called sideload.com).  The API allows for the syncing and streaming of music (to and from the locker). Added 5/24/06.
There are some notable music sites that don't provide web services are iTunes, Pandora, Yahoo Music, and All Music. It is great to see so many of the next generate music discovery services embracing open APIs.  It will be interesting to see what interesting mashups result from these systems.


Posted on: May 21, 2006

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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Comments:

Thanks for the mention Paul! Also, I know you've covered some of it before, but if anyone is interested in sample Musicmobs API applications they should take a look at some of the great work Andrew Hitchcock has done:

Album Cloud
Artist Cloud
Artist Gradient
Google Homepage Widget

Posted by Toby on May 21, 2006 at 04:40 PM EDT #

Pandora does have an API there's an invisible flash applet that can be used to pull information from. That's what the new version of PandoraFM uses. There's no hacks on the new version.

Posted by TheGiant on May 23, 2006 at 03:22 PM EDT #

Speaking of Music Mashups... Hi, my name is Gideon, I'm the owner and admin of ArtistServer.com I have a nice music and map mashup on ArtistServer you may want to check out: ArtistServer.com/map.cfm I've geocoded the 4,500+ artists on my site down to their city, and have integrated with Yahoo maps to provide an interesting way to browse for music. You can select a genre on the left, and it will load an overlay of artists who create music in that genre. Next, click on the headphone icons on the map to view an artists. And finally, you are show the songs by that artist in the selected genre. In otherwords, you can browse Earth by musical genre. I've also embeded a chat window above the map so site visitors can browse in parallel and talk about what they've found. ArtistServer.com's API is also under development. I currently provide RSS feeds to most of my data, but will have some other areas open up later this year. For example, I've started a 'widget' API - which will allow people to generate and embed site widgets containing music or ringtones from ArtistServer. BTW - you may want to add AOL to your list of music APIs, they released an API for Music Now: Music Now API Hasta, Gideon Marken

Posted by Gideon Marken on May 24, 2006 at 01:18 PM EDT #

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