MusicBrainz Scraper — Artists, Releases & Recordings

Search the open MusicBrainz music database and export the results as clean, structured JSON, CSV, Excel or XML. MusicBrainz is a community-built encyclopedia of music metadata, and this actor turns its catalog into a tidy dataset you can filter, analyse and feed into your own apps.

Pick an entity type — artist, release, recording, release group or label — type a search term, and the actor returns one row per match with names, titles, country, dates, track counts, labels and tags — instead of paging through the site by hand.

Built for music apps, catalog builders, researchers, data journalists and pipelines that need structured music metadata at scale.

What does the MusicBrainz Scraper do?

Choose what to search for, enter a query, and the actor paginates through the ranked results and returns clean rows:

• Artists — bands and performers, with sort name, type, country, gender, active years, tags and a relevance score.
• Releases — a specific album, single or EP edition, with the credited artist, release date, country, status, track count and label.
• Recordings — individual tracks/performances, with the credited artist, length, and the releases they appear on.
• Release groups — an album across all of its editions, with primary type, first release date and tags.
• Labels — record labels, with sort name, type, country and active years.

Every run returns one flat row per entity, so results are easy to sort, join and export.

What data can you get?

Artist

Field	Type	Description
id	string	MusicBrainz identifier (MBID) for the artist
name	string	Artist / band name
sortName	string	Sort-friendly form of the name
type	string	Person, Group, Orchestra, Choir, and so on
country	string	ISO country code associated with the artist
gender	string	Gender, where applicable
lifeSpan	object	Begin/end dates and whether the artist has ended
disambiguation	string	Short note that tells similarly named artists apart
tags	array	Community tags (genres, descriptors)
score	number	Relevance score for the search match (0–100)

Release

Field	Type	Description
id	string	MBID of the release
title	string	Release title
artist	string	Credited artist(s)
date	string	Release date
country	string	Release country
status	string	Official, Promotion, Bootleg, and so on
trackCount	integer	Number of tracks on the release
label	string	Record label, where present
type	string	Primary type of the parent release group (Album, Single, EP…)
score	number	Relevance score for the search match

Recording

Field	Type	Description
id	string	MBID of the recording
title	string	Recording (track) title
artist	string	Credited artist(s)
length	integer	Track length in milliseconds
firstReleaseDate	string	Earliest known release date
releaseCount	integer	How many releases include this recording
releases	array	Up to 25 releases the recording appears on (id, title, date, country)
tags	array	Community tags
score	number	Relevance score for the search match

Release groups and labels return an analogous set of fields (title/name, type, country, tags and score).

Use cases

• Music apps & catalogs — power search, autocomplete and lookups with structured artist, release and track metadata.
• Data enrichment — match your own tracks or artists to canonical MBIDs and clean metadata.
• Research & journalism — build datasets of artists, releases or labels for a genre, country or era.
• Discography building — enumerate an artist's releases and recordings into a spreadsheet.
• Pipelines & dashboards — feed clean music metadata into models, catalogs or internal tools.

How to use it

1. Add the MusicBrainz Scraper to your Apify account and open the input form.
2. Choose an Entity type — artist, release, recording, release group or label.
3. Enter a Search query (e.g. Radiohead or OK Computer).
4. Set Max items to cap the export.
5. Click Run, then export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or pull it via the Apify API.

Input example

{
  "entity": "artist",
  "query": "Radiohead",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Field	Type	Description
entity	string	What to search for: artist, release, recording, release-group or label.
query	string	Free-text search term (name, title or tag).
maxItems	integer	Maximum number of entities to return.

Output example

{
  "entityType": "artist",
  "id": "a74b1b7f-71a5-4011-9441-d0b5e4122711",
  "name": "Radiohead",
  "sortName": "Radiohead",
  "type": "Group",
  "country": "GB",
  "gender": null,
  "lifeSpan": { "begin": "1991", "ended": null },
  "disambiguation": null,
  "tags": ["rock", "alternative rock", "art rock", "electronic"],
  "score": 100
}

FAQ

What is MusicBrainz? MusicBrainz is an open, community-maintained encyclopedia of music metadata — artists, releases, recordings, release groups and labels — each with a stable identifier (an MBID) you can use to link records across systems.

Which entities can I search? Artists, releases, recordings, release groups and labels. Pick one per run with the Entity type field.

How many results can I get? As many as your search returns. Use Max items to cap a run and keep it cheap; results are paginated for you automatically.

How does billing work? You pay per entity you get, so small, tightly filtered runs stay inexpensive.

What export formats are supported? JSON, CSV, Excel and XML, plus direct access via the Apify API.

Can I use this with n8n? Yes. Run the MusicBrainz Scraper from n8n with the Apify node — trigger a run, wait for it to finish, and read the dataset items straight into your workflow to enrich tracks, build catalogs or drive lookups. It also works with Make, Zapier and the Apify API.

Can I connect this to other tools? The MusicBrainz Scraper connects with almost any cloud service or web app through integrations on the Apify platform — Make, Zapier, Slack, Google Drive and many more, plus webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Is this only public data? Yes. It returns only openly published MusicBrainz metadata. You are responsible for complying with MusicBrainz's terms and licensing.

Notes

Original clean-room implementation. Not affiliated with or endorsed by MusicBrainz or the MetaBrainz Foundation. Music metadata is published by the MusicBrainz community under its own licences; cite the original source where required.