BBC Music

The new bbc.co.uk/music site seeks to provide a definitive, persistent set of information about all the music the BBC plays. At the heart of the site are artist pages which aggregate information from around the BBC and elsewhere on the web. In addition to the artist pages you will find information about releases, album reviews, playcount information, genres, music news and much more.

What you need to know

About the API

As with programmes we have made this data available in a variety of formats, including: XML, YAML, JSON, RDF, Atom and RSS. These are intended not as human-readable representations but to assist data applications working with music data.

We currently have the following types of top-level page in the beta release:

The :mbz_guid for the artist pages is a Musicbrainz GUID. Our rationale for this is to help provide persistent URLs and to ease integration with third party systems. If you would like to know more about this please read Michael Smethurst’s post on the Radio Labs blog, The Simple Joys of Web-Scale Identifiers.

We have tried to ensure that each facet of information about an artist is independently addressable, and has its own resource. The following are the resources available from an individual artist page.

  • credits
  • news
  • connectedartists
  • releases
  • labels
  • links
  • reviews
  • wikipedia
  • promotions

Full information on these representations is available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/developers/#api

 

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