YouTube Music Artist Scraper

Search public YouTube for artist/channel profiles and return a rich, bounded record for each matched channel. The actor also captures visible public channel shelves such as videos, playlists, and featured channels, with public YouTube and YouTube Music URLs.

Data collected

• Artist/channel name, handle, channel ID, canonical/profile URLs, and YouTube Music URL
• Description, description length, keywords when published, subscriber and video counts
• Verification and official-artist indicators when exposed, badges, avatar and banner thumbnails
• Visible channel tabs and bounded shelves with video, playlist, and featured-channel metadata
• Search source, rank, page, renderer provenance, continuation visibility, locale, and scrape time
• Exact four-field diagnostics for failed public search/profile pages

The actor reads ordinary public HTML pages and embedded initial page data. It does not use private request protocols, login state, CAPTCHA bypass, stealth, or credential-bearing URLs. If direct access fails and fallback is enabled, one account-authorized Apify Proxy route is tried with bounded retries.

Input

searchQueries and startUrls are both optional, but at least one must be supplied.

{
  "searchQueries": ["Adele", "Kendrick Lamar"],
  "startUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@adele"],
  "maxItems": 3,
  "maxSections": 10,
  "maxSectionItems": 10,
  "includeSections": true,
  "includeDiagnostics": true,
  "enableProxyFallback": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

Search continuation availability is reported in continuationDetected and continuationCount; this actor intentionally does not make unbounded continuation requests. OUTPUT contains the run status, counts, page attempts, shelf coverage, proxy configuration state, and failure/block diagnostics.

Local verification

npm test
npx apify validate-schema
npx apify run --purge --input-file qa-inputs/youtube-music-artist-scraper/local-validation.json
node validate-datasets.js