Huge list of Bands/ Music artisits?

[rgordon83]

Anyone know if there is a place to find/ buy a massive list of major bands and musical artists (rappers etc.)?

I am starting to make a spreadsheet on my own, but taking a long ass time...

Can i scrape it from a site or something? not sure how that stuff works...

 

[SUP3RNOVA]

Scrape Amazon.com or something.

 

[rgordon83]

Scrape Amazon.com or something.

Thanks Paul,
I was thinking something like that. Only thing is, i don't really know how to "scrape". Do i need to know how to code to do that? can i copy their source code?

thanks...

 

[clownstep]

rentacoder.com

can get somebody to do it for you cheap

 

[rgordon83]

rentacoder.com

can get somebody to do it for you cheap

thanks! i'll check it out now.

Would it be cheaper than DP?

Some times i think DP has slave labor going on there, or programming "sweat shops"....

(Once had some dude create a custom wordpress widget for $20. it took him like 7-8 hours...)

 

[Deliguy]

either download a lyrics database or use the audioscrobbler.net api (last.fm's source)
If you're building a large music site you should talk to me first to see if we can work out a partnership.

 

[xmcp123]

I will take you down good sir.

 

[aim]

Get creative with google:

Artists Albums filetype - Google Search

You can find stuff like this:

Index of /sql/data

 

[wrstroud]

either download a lyrics database or use the audioscrobbler.net api (last.fm's source)
If you're building a large music site you should talk to me first to see if we can work out a partnership.

You could easily make a huge site given the above api. For example, you can find any random username and pull up a list of their top artists using this:
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/name/systemrecs.xml

Scrape each of those artists and add them to the db. For each of the 50 or so artists that you just scraped, you can find 50 more artists that are similar to each individual previously scraped artist using this:
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/artist/Andre%203000/similar.xml

For each of those artists, you can find their top tracks using this query:
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/artist/Andre 3000/toptracks.xml

Going back to the original user that you got the data from in the first link (in this case the username = "name"), you can find users with similar tastes using this query:
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/name/neighbours.xml

Finally, you can use this regex to scrape lyrics for each track off AZlyrics.com:

$regex = '/<BR>(.*?)<\/BR>/';
preg_match_all($regex,$data,$match);

The above should work, but I haven't tested

Gather information from a bunch of sources, package it up into a good database, then make a nice design for it. If you used the above api from last.fm, you can keep branching out on the different artists until you have gathered a reasonable sized database. Oh and make sure you have the server resources to be able to do all this...shared hosting won't fly well.

 

[rgordon83]

Wow, thanks for all your help guys. This will definitely be my whole day project tomorrow.

My wife officially hates all of you.