MusicBrainz Artist & Release Lookup (Free)

Bulk artist lookup and discography scraper powered by MusicBrainz, the open music encyclopedia. Give it a list of artist or band names and it returns clean, structured JSON for each one: MBID, country, artist type, gender, tags/genres, life span, ISNI/IPI identifiers, and the full list of release groups (albums, EPs, singles) sorted by first release date.

Ideal for music data enrichment, building a music catalogue, deduplicating artist names against a canonical ID, or feeding an LLM/RAG pipeline with reliable music metadata. This actor is 100% free — you only pay your own Apify platform usage.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
artists	array of strings	(required)	Artist or band names to look up. One dataset item per name.
includeReleaseGroups	boolean	true	Also fetch the artist's albums, EPs and singles.
maxReleaseGroups	integer	25	Max release groups returned per artist (1–100).

Output

One dataset item per input name, always with an explicit status field (found, not_found or error) — the actor never crashes on a bad name.

{
  "status": "found",
  "query": "Daft Punk",
  "mbid": "056e4f3e-d505-4dad-8ec1-d04f521cbb56",
  "name": "Daft Punk",
  "sortName": "Daft Punk",
  "type": "Group",
  "disambiguation": "French electronic duo",
  "country": "FR",
  "area": "France",
  "beginArea": "Paris",
  "lifeSpanBegin": "1993",
  "lifeSpanEnd": "2021",
  "ended": true,
  "isnis": ["0000000123456789"],
  "tags": ["electronic", "house"],
  "matchScore": 100,
  "musicbrainzUrl": "https://musicbrainz.org/artist/056e4f3e-d505-4dad-8ec1-d04f521cbb56",
  "releaseGroupCount": 2,
  "releaseGroups": [
    {
      "mbid": "1c205a81-1d1c-3b4d-8b1e-6b0b0a0a0a0a",
      "title": "Homework",
      "primaryType": "Album",
      "secondaryTypes": [],
      "firstReleaseDate": "1997-01-20",
      "url": "https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1c205a81-1d1c-3b4d-8b1e-6b0b0a0a0a0a"
    }
  ],
  "error": null
}

Use cases

• Enrich a music library or playlist with canonical MBIDs, genres and countries.
• Resolve messy artist names from a CRM, ticketing or streaming export to one stable identifier.
• Build a discography dataset for analytics, recommendation or research.
• Feed an AI agent / RAG index with trustworthy, licence-clean music metadata.

Limitations & fair use

• Data comes from the MusicBrainz web service. Core data is public domain (CC0); supplementary data is CC BY-NC-SA — check the MusicBrainz licence before commercial redistribution.
• MusicBrainz allows max 1 request per second per client. This actor respects that limit with a built-in delay, so large lists take roughly 1–2 seconds per artist. This is intentional and keeps the service healthy for everyone.
• Search returns the best match for a name. For guaranteed precision, prefer exact official spellings.
• Network calls retry up to 3 times with backoff; unrecoverable failures are reported as an error item rather than crashing the run.

More actors by this developer

Browse the full collection of free data and enrichment actors: apify.com/fit_melon