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New Music Release Calendar Scraper

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New Music Release Calendar Scraper

Scrapes new music releases from three independent sources — MusicBrainz, Apple Music charts, and Metacritic — and returns a unified, deduplicated feed of albums and singles. Ideal for weekly release tracking, playlist curation, sync licensing research, and music industry analytics.

What it does

The scraper fetches releases from three sources in sequence and merges them by artist + title + date:

  • MusicBrainz (canonical spine) — paginated JSON API returning releases with MBID, label, barcode, country, and release type. Covers the broadest range of global releases including independent labels.
  • Apple Music RSS — top-played albums from Apple's marketing feed. Adds Apple Music URLs and genre tags for chart-ranked releases.
  • Metacritic new releases — HTML scrape of the Metacritic music release calendar. Adds critic scores for reviewed albums.

Records from different sources are merged when they match on artist + title + date. The source field records where the record originated; cross-source enrichment fields (like metacritic_score on an Apple RSS record) indicate a successful match.

Input

Field Type Default Description
maxItems integer 10 Maximum total records to return across all sources. Each source gets an equal share. Set to 0 for no limit.
sources array ["musicbrainz", "apple_rss", "metacritic"] Which sources to query. Any combination of the three values.
dateFrom string First day of current month Start of the release date range (YYYY-MM-DD). Used for MusicBrainz query.
dateTo string Today End of the release date range (YYYY-MM-DD). Used for MusicBrainz query.
appleCountry string us Two-letter country code for the Apple Music RSS feed.

Output

Each record in the dataset contains:

Field Type Description
title string Album or single title
artist string Artist name (multiple artists joined with " & ")
release_date string Release date (YYYY-MM-DD format where available)
release_type string Album, Single, EP, Compilation, etc.
label string Record label (MusicBrainz source only)
country string Release territory (MusicBrainz or Apple RSS)
mbid string MusicBrainz Release ID — use as a join key with other music datasets
barcode string UPC barcode where present (MusicBrainz source)
apple_music_url string Direct Apple Music URL (Apple RSS or matched records)
metacritic_score number Critic aggregate score 0-100 (Metacritic source or matched records)
source string Origin source: musicbrainz, apple_rss, or metacritic
genres string Genre tags, pipe-separated (Apple RSS source)
source_url string Direct URL to the release page on the source site

Example output record

{
  "title": "ICEMAN",
  "artist": "Drake",
  "release_date": "2026-05-15",
  "release_type": "Album",
  "label": "",
  "country": "US",
  "mbid": "",
  "barcode": "",
  "apple_music_url": "https://music.apple.com/us/album/iceman/6769568449",
  "metacritic_score": 54,
  "source": "apple_rss",
  "genres": "Hip-Hop/Rap",
  "source_url": "https://music.apple.com/us/album/iceman/6769568449"
}

Use cases

  • Weekly "New Music Friday" tracker — run weekly with default dates to get every release that dropped this week across all three sources.
  • Playlist curation — filter by metacritic_score for critically acclaimed new releases, or by genres from Apple.
  • Sync licensing research — use mbid to join with MusicBrainz detailed metadata (ISRC codes, work relationships, licensing information).
  • Music retail and distribution — barcode and label fields from MusicBrainz support retail catalogue matching.
  • Market analysis — combine chart position (Apple RSS rank), critical reception (Metacritic score), and release metadata for trend analysis.

Rate limits and performance

MusicBrainz enforces a 1 request/second limit. The scraper respects this with a 1.1-second delay between pages. For large date ranges, a single run may take several minutes. Metacritic and Apple RSS have no enforced limits.

For weekly "new releases" workflows, the default date range (current month) with maxItems of 50-100 completes in under 2 minutes.

Notes

  • MusicBrainz Lucene queries use month-level granularity (YYYY-MM). The dateFrom/dateTo fields control the month range.
  • Metacritic only indexes reviewed albums (typically major label and notable independent releases). It does not cover singles or unreviewed releases.
  • Apple RSS returns the top N most-played albums in the requested country, not a comprehensive release calendar.
  • The deduplication key is normalized artist + title + release date. Alternate versions of the same album may appear as separate records if the titles differ significantly.
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