LyricWiki API: Get Song Lyrics via Code

KevinFarnham, March 31st, 2008   Comments(2)

LyricWiki.org is a terrific, free archive of song lyrics. How large? At the moment it has over 669,000 content pages. It’s a broad and deep catalog. Search for Alanis Morissette and you’ll see that she released three albums prior to her famous “Jagged Little Pill” in 1995. With such a useful database it’s fortunate for developers and web site owners there’s the LyricWiki API. This well documented SOAP-based API provides methods that enable programmed search, get, and post operations.

The LyricWiki API lets you search for songs, artists, and albums. You can get the lyrics for a specific song; get an artist’s discography; or get a track listing for a specific album. You can also post new information into the LyricWiki archive: a new artist, an album, and song lyrics. The API exposes many of their site features like Song of the Day and Album of the Week.

These two recent mashup entries show how developers are using this API, including Lyrics Muse (profile) which enables last.fm users to quickly see lyrics for the music they’re listening to.

If you’ve got a music-related site, and you’d like to provide your visitors with lyrics, applying the LyricWiki API will give you and your site visitors access to what may well be the largest lyrics archive on the Web.

For more music-related APIs and mashups check the ProgrammableWeb Music Dashboard.

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Imeem Opens Music-centric Social API

John Musser, March 25th, 2008   Comments(0)

Imeem, the third largest social network in the US, has just opened their “imeem Media Platform” for third party developers. Besides having access to Imeem’s 24 million users, the thing that will likely attract developers to this platform is their video, photo and, most importantly, music content. This is because Imeem has licensed millions of songs from the major music labels and these will be directly available via the platform. The API is Flex and ActionScript3-based (for more more technical details check our Imeem API profile).

The feature for this set of web services and client libraries includes:

• Access media on imeem, including music, videos, and photos
• Access to imeem’s social graph, including users, friends, and associated profile data
• Fully customize a skinless imeem media player
• Upload music, videos, and photos and modify associated metadata
• Search imeem’s media content by keyword, artist, title, or album
• Access imeem’s most frequently played music and videos and recommended content
• Create, edit, and manage new playlists or access millions of music, video, and photo playlists created by imeem users

Other notable details of the launch:

• The platform itself exposes the underlying infrastructure for hosting, transcoding and delivering media.
• As has become increasingly common lately, the platform is initially available in a sandbox mode that’s available to developers only, not the general public.
• OpenSocial compatibility is not part of this launch and is scheduled for the coming months.
• Imeem’s announcement includes suggestions of possible sample apps ranging from recommendation engines to customer players (ala Winamp, an Imeem inspiration) to quizzes.

As we’ve seen with 142 web music mashups and 25+ music APIs, there’s no shortage of developer interest in music applications, and combining this will Imeem’s social network could prove to be a winning combination.

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25 Music APIs

KevinFarnham, February 21st, 2008   Comments(10)

[Editor’s note: Today’s post comes from Kevin Farnham, who we are very happy to have joining us as a regular contributor here at ProgrammableWeb.]

Whether you’re a performer or a listener who enjoys discovering great new music, there are many music APIs available to help you accomplish your objectives. Last.fm is among the most popular music destinations on the Web. Its API provides you with data about Last.fm members, artists, albums, tracks, and more. More than 36 Last.fm Mashups are available, and the list keeps growing. With the recent addition of the handy LyricsFly API and its database of lyrics for 314,000 songs, there are now 25 music APIs in the ProgrammableWeb directory (as well as 135 music-related mashups).

But Last.fm is just one example. There are APIs that help you discover music you may like, APIs that provide detailed metadata about music, and APIs that let you store and manage your music online. Other APIs provide online radio and music subscription services. There are APIs for customizing music players, finding live music, and even for selling your own music. So many that ProgrammableWeb has just added a place to track them: the Music API and Mashup Dashboard.

Managing Your Music

Managing your music collection no longer means maintaining an orderly stack of CDs. Today we enjoy music from so many different locations and on so many different kinds of devices, that it can be easy to forget where it all is. In addition, music is available everywhere, but how can you find music that you will like?

These are the types of problems that developers are trying to solve with music APIs. Here’s a breakdown of what’s available and what problem the APIs address.

Music Discovery

How do you find new music that you’re likely to enjoy? And once you find it, how do you bring it into your music collection and manage it such that you’ll be able to find it later on? We’ve already talked about Last.fm. But a lot of other good solutions are also available.

Like Last.fm, the OpenStrands API takes a Web 2.0 approach to music discovery: the API provides programmable access to the MyStrands.com community’s recommendation, tagging and playlist services. Other music search tools include the Digital Podcast API, which lets you search for music using keywords, the SeeqPod API, where you enter the name of a song you like, and API returns a list of recommended songs, and the Yahoo Audio Search API, which enables structured and unstructured queries for finding audio files and correlated music data.

The MusicDNS API deserves special mention: it will automatically compare your music with all the music in its database using algorithms, then identify artists whose work is similar to your own.

About the Music (Music Metadata)

Once you’ve found music you like listening to, you may want to find out more information, about the songs, the artists… Several APIs provide information about music — that is, metadata. Freedb / CDDB provides information about music CDs: artist, CD-title, track list, and other information. The interesting thing is that a track for which you’d like to find information can be on a CD in your computer’s CD-drive, or on many different Freedb-compliant devices.

The MusicBrainz API, Tunelog API, and Discogs API all take a Web 2.0 approach, providing access to a large database of music metadata that is maintained by or based on the collective actions of the MusicBrainz, Tunelog, and Discogs communities.

Media Management and Online Broadcasting

Several APIs are help you manage your music. The Faces.com API and Ipernity API let you share music, pictures, and video with your friends and other members of the site.

Sharing your media is not all that different from broadcasting it, today. But some sites prefer the term broadcasting, implying more professional content. The Orb API allows you to broadcast your music, videos, photos, and more. Meanwhile, the RadioTime API enables you to find and enjoy over 60,000 online radio stations around the globe.

The Rhapsody API and subscription music service lets you programmatically manage your Rhapsody playlists, search for music, and access your Rhapsody RSS feeds.

Music Players

There’s music, then there’s how you listen to it. The Yahoo Music Engine API, the Winamp API, and the MP3Tunes API each offer the ability customizable their respective music players via code.

Music Events

After listening to some tunes by a new artist, you may want to see them perform in person. The Eventful API, JamBase API, and Gruvr API all let you search for concert information and other events. Eventful goes a step further by letting you “demand” an appearance by a performer in your area. Gruvr’s API lets you integrate live music maps and concert schedules into your own site.

APIs For Performers

If you’re a performer, then you’re sure to be interested in the above APIs. You’ll want to have your music available wherever listeners are searching for new music. You want to submit your songs to MusicDNS.org so that people who like your kind of music will be more likely to discover your own music. You’ll certainly want to publicize your performance calendar using the APIs for Eventful, JamBase, and Gruvr. And when it comes to selling your recordings, investigate the SNOCAP API, which will help you set up your own music store.

Music Mashups

Music APIs make a wide variety of music mashups possible. One of the earlier and more popular music mashups in our listings is MusicPortl, which collates information about a specific artist from across the entire web, creating a page that includes biographical information, photos, album releases, videos, blogs, and more. MusicPortl applies seven different APIs to provide all this information: Amazon eCommerce API, Flickr API, Last.fm API, MusicBrainz API, Ontok API, Technorati API, and the YouTube API.

Many music-related mashups aggregate artist data from around the Web into a unified search interface. One of which is FoxyTunes, which was acquired by Yahoo! earlier this month and you can see our listing with APIs used here.

Of the 135 music-related mashups listed, some of the more popular include: TuneGlue, ZonTube, KEXPlorer.com, MusicTonic, One Hit Wonders Map, JukeboxTube, Indie Tube, NPR Station Map and Mashup Camp winners PodBop and the Hype Machine.

We’ll cover more of these in an upcoming post.

Summary

The variety of music-related APIs is enormous, and the number of music APIs keeps growing. Click here for an updated list of currently available music APIs.

• Digital Podcast - Podcast search
• Discogs - Music database
• Eventful - Events discovery and demand
• Faces.com - Photo and media sharing service
• Freedb / CDDB - Online CD catalog service
• Gruvr - Live music and concert information
• Ipernity - Media sharing service
• JamBase - Live music and concert information
• Last.fm - Music playlist management
• LyricsFly - Lyrics database
• MP3Tunes - Music services
• MusicBrainz - Music metadata community service
• MusicDNS.org - Music fingerprinting service
• MusicMobs - Social music service
• OpenStrands - Music recommendation and discovery
• Orb - Digital media remote access and management
• RadioTime - Music and talk radio service
• Rhapsody - Online music services
• SeeqPod - Music recommendation service
• SNOCAP - Digital music marketplace
• Tunelog - Music metadata management
• WebJay - Music playlist management
• Winamp - Customizable music player
• Yahoo Audio Search - Music search services
• Yahoo Music Engine - Desktop music player

Kevin Farnham runs Lyra Technical Systems, a small software consulting and publishing company where he often works with O’Reilly Media, currently as Community Manager for the Threading Building Blocks open source project and was previously the Managing Editor for the AOL Developer Community. On the software engineering side Kevin specializes in mathematical modeling, simulation, and scientific data analysis.

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3 New Mashups for Finding Music Videos

John Musser, January 23rd, 2008   Comments(0)

Want to find videos, music samples or the latest news for your favorite band or musician? Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a fair number of new mashups added here designed to help you search for music artists and information about them. The data mashed-up includes music tracks, photos, news, artist history, and videos, with video search becoming increasingly common. Here are three of the latest from the last week alone (APIs used in this set include Last.fm, YouTube, MusicBrainz and the Amazon E-commerce API):

• musicmesh: Use musicmesh as a web-based music exploration tool. Browse through a dynamically generated graph of albums that are similar to your seed album. Listen to tracks and watch videos as you browse.



• Coast Rack: Coast Rack searches for artists tracks and their videos from sources including Last.fm, MusicBrainz, and YouTube.



• Visual YouTube: Enter your search terms into Visual YouTube and then see 50 thumbnails of videos. Hover over one for a description and click it to play the video. Also lists web, news, blog, image, and book search results.

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YottaMusic and the Limits of APIs

John Musser, January 4th, 2008   Comments(1)

Web APIs rarely do everything the underlying site or service does. They are typically a defined subset of the total functionality. While understandable from a business strategy and resource perspective, these limits can be frustrating for developers. Sometimes this leads them to find a solution using undocumented APIs, often services used by the UI of the site, that provides them enough functionality to meet their needs (which was essentially the case with the original Google Maps, an undocumented JavaScript API until Paul Rademacher reverse engineered them and built HousingMaps.com).

Read the rest of “YottaMusic and the Limits of APIs” »

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36 Last.fm Mashups

John Musser, November 27th, 2007   Comments(4)

If you want to see an interesting set of music-themed mashups, checkout our list of 36 Last.fm mashups all of which in some way utilize the Last.fm API. Many provide unique ways to search for artist data, photos and videos and connect these to Last.fm playlists. Here are three of the most popular entries (note that you can also browse the whole set of these by thumbnail and popularity here):

• TuneGlue (see our full profile here): Slick interactive visualization of the relationship between music artists using the Last.fm and Amazon.com.uk APIs.



• FoxyTunes Planet (see our FoxyTunes profile): Universal personalized music mashup integrating many music resources into one place, then making them available through the FoxyTunes browser extension, which supports more than 30 media players and music services. Uses 8 different APIs.



• MusicPortl (see our MusicPortl profile): Another music data aggregator that lets you search by artist. Integrates data using 6 APIs including the Technorati API for blog posts, the YouTube API for videos, and the Flickr API for photos.

If you want to see more music-themed mashups you can look through 120 mashups tagged music in our directory.

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New Mashups for Video and Music Search

John Musser, July 12th, 2007   Comments(2)

There’s been an increase in the number of web mashups for video and music lately. Here are three of the more interesting ones from the past two weeks:

• Chime.TV: Slick Flash-based video aggregation service. Videos from blip.tv, Break.com, DailyMotion, Google Videos, Kewego, MetaCafe, MySpace, Veoh.com, YouTube all in one place. From Taylor McKnight, the creator of Podbop, the winner of best mashup at the Mashup Camp 1 that we mentioned just yesterday.



• utrecht Music Video Search: Music video search from YouTube data.



• esFresh: Music videos on demand. Includes data from Last.fm and YouTube.

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Mashup Camp 4 Next Week

John Musser, July 11th, 2007   Comments(1)

Mashup Camp 4, the premier event for mashup developers and API providers takes place next week in Mountain View. There is no better place to go to meet with the key players in this field: mashup developers, API providers, tool providers, VCs and a range of other interesting folks (see the Who’s Coming List).

Camp organizers David Berlind and Doug Gold always deliver a terrific event and David gives a good overview of the event in his ZDNet blog this week. And speaking of blogs and who’s going, mashup developer Joe Duck has this summary of Mashup Camp Blogs.

One of the highlights of the event is always the Speed Geeking competition where attendees get to see mashup developers demo their creations and vote for their favorites. This time it’s in the form of the Business Mashup Challenge, a competition sponsored by IBM, StrikeIron, Kapow, Dapper and AccuWeather. Past winners are some of the more fun and innovative mashups out there:

• Podbop: Winner of the very first Mashup Camp contest. Slick podcast app that combines band event data from Eventful with MP3 tracks. Type in a city, get MP3s, discover a band you like, and go see them.



• The Hype Machine: Winner of Best Mashup at Mashup Camp 3 in Jan 2007. The Hype Machine is an experiment that keeps track of songs and discussion posted on the best blogs about music.



• Weather Bonk: Rich mashup with live weather, forecasts, webcams, and more on a Google Map.

Past ProgrammableWeb coverage of Mashup Camp contests: Mashup Camp 3 Winners, Mashup Camp 2 Winners and Mashup Camp 1.

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New APIs: Widgets, Music, Events

John Musser, April 4th, 2007   Comments(1)

In addition to the new enterprise APIs, the latest entries to our API listings in the past few days cover widgets, events and music. Here’s a summary:

• yourminis: Launched last fall, this Flash-based widget startpage from the folks at Goowy now has a Flash API so you can develop your own widgets. Because they’re Flash widgets and portable they can also be integrated into sites like MySpace. Check the for some straightforward tutorials.
• SNOCAP: This digital music distribution service from Napster founder Shawn Fanning offers a new API. Here’s how they describe the service and the API “Through the SNOCAP proprietary Digital Registry, artists and labels are empowered to easily promote and sell their music through digital retailers or through their own unique artist store. In turn, these retailers have a growing inventory, offering more music to more music fans. The MyStore Search API allows web applications to search for SNOCAP MyStores and display them on a web page. The API accepts artist names and/or track titles passed as URL parameters and returns results as an object in javascript object notation (JSON). This interface is useful for applications that wish to render MyStore storefronts on web pages based on contextual metadata matching.” Below is SNOCAP MyStore Search, an example mashup using their API and lets you play music in their embeddable Flash player



• Eventfinder.co.nz: This New Zealand-based events service offers an API. Note that not a lot of specifics are available without first signing-up.

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New AOL Music Now API

John Musser, May 11th, 2006   Comments(1)

AOL has just released an RSS-based API for accessing Music now information on members, artists, albums, charts and playlists. It’s a fairly straightforward API. For example, to get the latest releases use the URL /rss/newreleases/ (from the domain aol.musicnow.com), or, to get the top Eric Clapton fans use /rss/artist/topfans/?id=211. All results use RSS.

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