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
• A run-level diagnostic count for failed public search/profile pages; these messages are logged, not added as dataset rows

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,
  "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 Apify run status (SUCCEEDED or FAILED), dataStatus (COMPLETE, PARTIAL, NO_RESULTS, or FAILED), source-backed record counts, diagnostic counts, page attempts, shelf coverage, and proxy configuration state. The dataset contains artist/channel records only.

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