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Rhapsody's having a web mashup contest, the developer of the best web app that uses their API will win  some nifty prizes. 

Rhapsody has been offering the Rhapsody web services for their music subscription service for some time now.  The web service gives access to the data and the music provided by rhapsody. Here's a quick summary of what you can do with this service:

• Get info on an artist - Example: http://feeds.rhapsody.com/weezer/data.xml - This includes the artist's discography, top albums, top tracks, bio info, playlists, rich genre info
  
• Get info on an album - Example: http://feeds.rhapsody.com/weezer/98380_weezer/data.xml - This includes detailed track info, album art, release dates
• Search for an artist, album or track: Example: http://realsearch.real.com/search?searchtype=RhapArtist&query=shinedown -This search seems to be using a pronunciation or edit distance, fuzzy string match since 'shinedown' also finds 'shakedown' and 'shi town'.

One of the distinctives of this web api is that with it, you can get links to play music with the Rhapsody player. (Unfortunately, this would invariably crash my web browser).  Also, there's a really rich genre taxonomy  (perfect to use as class labels for all of those music related machine learning tasks), artist bios, artist geographic location (google maps mashup anyone?). 

Some of the downsides: 

• it is not a complete catalog (no Beatles for instance),
  
• There's no user usage data (It'd be great to know how popular a particular track is).
• You can only use the data for personal use, no commercial use allowed.

All in all, Rhapsody's Web API is a great addition to the growing world of Music Discovery Web Services.

First seen on NetBlogsAndRocknRoll  and MixedContent.