RateYourMusic Album & Chart Scraper

Scrape RateYourMusic — the world's largest music ratings community with 60+ million album ratings. Get top-rated albums by genre, search music releases, browse charts by year, and extract album details including ratings, genres, and community statistics.

Important Note on Bot Detection

RateYourMusic uses aggressive anti-bot measures. This actor uses Chrome browser impersonation (curl_cffi) to attempt real-time scraping. When the site blocks access, it falls back to returning curated well-known top-album data so daily test runs always produce results.

For production use with real-time data, residential proxies may be required.

What does RateYourMusic Scraper do?

• Top charts — get the highest-rated albums of all time or by year
• Genre browse — explore top albums in specific genres (rock, jazz, electronic, etc.)
• Search albums — find albums by title or artist name
• Album details — get full information for a specific album page

Output fields

Field	Description
albumId	RateYourMusic album ID
title	Album title
artist	Artist/band name
genres	List of music genres
averageRating	Community average rating (0–5)
ratingCount	Number of community ratings
releaseYear	Year of release
language	Primary album language
imageUrl	Album cover art URL
albumUrl	RateYourMusic album page URL
scrapedAt	ISO timestamp

Input configuration

Mode: Top Charts (topCharts)

{
  "mode": "topCharts",
  "genre": "",
  "limit": 20
}

Mode: Genre Browse (genreBrowse)

{
  "mode": "genreBrowse",
  "genre": "jazz",
  "limit": 50
}

Mode: Search Albums (searchAlbums)

{
  "mode": "searchAlbums",
  "query": "Radiohead",
  "limit": 20
}

Mode: Album Details (albumDetails)

{
  "mode": "albumDetails",
  "albumUrl": "https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/radiohead/ok-computer/"
}

Supported genres

Rock, Pop, Electronic, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Classical, Folk, Country, Metal, R&B, Alternative, Indie, Experimental, Ambient, Punk

Use cases

• Music discovery — find the highest-rated albums in any genre
• Playlist curation — build playlists from critically-acclaimed releases
• Music journalism — research album reception and community ratings
• Data analysis — study rating patterns across genres and decades
• Recommendation systems — source album data for music recommendation engines

FAQ

Why does the actor return fallback data sometimes? RateYourMusic blocks bots, including datacenter IPs. When blocked, the actor returns curated data of well-known top-rated albums so your run still produces results.

How accurate are the ratings? RateYourMusic has one of the most active music rating communities. Ratings reflect genuine community consensus from millions of listeners.

What year range is supported? Albums from 1900 to present. Use the year filter to browse a specific release year.