album release dates, billboard charts

[jhofman]

does anyone know of good sources to get album release dates and/or
billboard chart information over the last year or so?

it looks like limited information is available from billboard.com as
well as last.fm, but wondering if there are other pre-compiled data
sets or easily accessible apis that can be used.

thanks in advance for any help.

[Jake Hofman]

found this right after posting, of course:

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Database_Download

which should have release dates.

and leads on billboard charts still very welcome :)

thanks.

[Jake Hofman]

apologies for wasting ppl's time:

http://developer.billboard.com/docs/The_Chart_Service/Resources/Search

[Sean Flannagan]

I was just going to send that! There's also Discogs but the release dates can be unreliable:

http://www.discogs.com/data/
http://www.discogs.com/help/api

Sean
http://datamob.org

[Samuel Klein]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Record_Charts/ToDo

(see the external links in the right-hand column)

Wikipedia has lots of quiet clusters of database scrapers. In
general, checking Wikipedia:WikiProject_<foo> where foo is the
supercategory of what you're interested in can get you some useful
information.

SJ

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 5:43 PM, Jake Hofman<jho...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

[Philip (Flip) Kromer]

MusicBrainz has a ton of info, though if you're linking, consider slicing it out of the DBPedia DBTune or Freebase datasets; their versions are very nicely entity resolved. Pointers here:
  http://infochimps.org/search?query=musicbrainz

and a few more:

  http://infochimps.org/search?query=music

 

The best, and the most complete, and the most we're-just-pointing,-you're-on-your-own-to-get-it is the Whitburn project. Via Andy Baio (waxy.org):

For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they've created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song's duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It's 25 megs of OCD, and it's awesome.

As far as I know, this is the first time the project and its data have ever been discussed outside of Usenet. Despite its illegality, they've created a wonderful resource and you can do some fun things with the data.

flip 

PS you may notice infochimps.org looks slightly different... we're a ways off from launching, and we're neither publicizing nor not publicizing it, but it's starting to become actually useful. We'll be sending out the first wave of beta invites soon, you can sign up on the front page.

[Jake Hofman]

thanks for all of the responses. the speedy and quality of responses
on this list never ceases to amaze.

-j