MusicBrainz Scraper

MusicBrainz Scraper: artists, releases, recordings and labels with their MBIDs

Pick what you are looking for, type a search term, and get flat rows back from MusicBrainz, the open music encyclopedia. Every row carries an MBID, the permanent ID you can join on later, plus the name, type, dates, country and a direct link. No API key, no login.

One thing to know before you plan a big pull: MusicBrainz asks callers to go slowly, so this reads 100 records a page with about a second between pages. Ten thousand records is a real wait, not a few seconds, and that pacing is deliberate.

🔍 What MusicBrainz Scraper does

It runs one search against MusicBrainz and pages through the answers until it has the number you asked for or the catalogue runs out. Rows are deduplicated on MBID as it goes, so a paginated pull never hands you the same record twice.

entity decides what kind of thing you get back, and the five kinds are genuinely different:

query takes plain keywords like ok computer, and it also takes MusicBrainz's own Lucene syntax, so artist:radiohead and country:GB both work.

📥 What you give it

{
  "entity": "release-group",
  "query": "ok computer",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Send an empty query and the run returns a BAD_INPUT row instead of records.

📤 What you get back

A real artist row from a recent run, with the tag list cut short because it runs to dozens:

{
  "ok": true,
  "mbid": "a74b1b7f-71a5-4011-9441-d0b5e4122711",
  "entity": "artist",
  "url": "https://musicbrainz.org/artist/a74b1b7f-71a5-4011-9441-d0b5e4122711",
  "score": 100,
  "disambiguation": null,
  "name": "Radiohead",
  "sortName": "Radiohead",
  "type": "Group",
  "country": "GB",
  "artistCredit": null,
  "date": null,
  "lifeSpan": "1991 –",
  "beginDate": "1991",
  "endDate": null,
  "ended": null,
  "tags": ["alternative rock", "art rock", "rock", "british", "experimental rock", "..."]
}

Five fields are on every row whatever you searched for:

The rest depend on the entity:

artistCredit is the credited string the way MusicBrainz writes it, so A feat. B stays A feat. B. A field MusicBrainz has no value for comes back null rather than missing, and tags are sorted by vote count.

🧾 Reading the output

Two kinds of row land in your dataset.

A malformed Lucene query can come back as NO_RESULTS rather than an error. If a search you expected to match returns nothing, check the syntax before you conclude the record is not there.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open MusicBrainz Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Pick an Entity type. Artist is the default. 3. Type your term into Search query. 4. Set Max results. Start around 10 to see the shape of the output, then click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.20 per 1,000 records. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

You pay per record delivered. Duplicate MBIDs across pages are dropped before anything is charged, and diagnostic rows are not charged.

💡 What people use it for

• Resolving a messy catalogue of artist or album names to MBIDs, so everything downstream has one

key to join on.

• Filling in release dates, countries and label codes for a back catalogue.
• Pulling a genre slice with Lucene syntax, then sorting on score to see what actually matched.
• Checking whether a release exists in the open catalogue at all before adding it by hand.

🚧 What it does not do

• Search only. No lookup by MBID, no browsing an artist's releases, no track listings.
• No audio, no cover art, no chart positions.
• Relevance ordering is MusicBrainz's. score is its search score, not a popularity measure.
• Large runs are slow on purpose. The pacing is what MusicBrainz asks of callers, and this

actor keeps to it.

• If a page fails partway through a long run, the run ends with a diagnostic row and the records

already collected do not land. On big pulls, several smaller runs are safer than one huge one.

• A malformed query reads as no results, not as a syntax error.

🧭 Which open-data scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a MusicBrainz account or key? No. The search API is open and this actor uses no credential of yours.

What is an MBID for? It is a permanent identifier for one record. Store it once and you can re-find or re-join that artist, album or track later even if the name changes.

Can I look a record up by its MBID? Not with this one. It searches by text.

Why is my 10,000-record run taking minutes? The pacing. MusicBrainz asks callers to go slowly and this respects that, so time scales with the number of pages.

Can I use the data commercially? MusicBrainz core data is CC0 and the rest sits under its own data licences. Read those and credit MusicBrainz when you redistribute.

Can I schedule it? Yes, like any Apify actor.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the entity, the exact query and the run ID. The errorCode on the diagnostic row usually names the problem on its own.