BBC Music
BETA
The new bbc.co.uk/music site seeks to provide a definitive, persistent set of information about all the music the BBC plays. At the heart of the site are artist pages which aggregate information from around the BBC and elsewhere on the web. In addition to the artist pages you will find information about releases, album reviews, playcount information, genres, music news and much more.
A core feature of the site is the integration with external services - notably (External) MusicBrainz and (External) Wikipedia . We are using these services to provide core information (discographies, biographical information, membership etc) about artists and releases. We are then combining this data with information from within the BBC - including details about which BBC programmes have played that artist.
The site is still under active development. The first beta release provided the core functionality in late 2008, and we have now deployed a richer, more interactive site. We will be offering more again in due course but we would love to hear what you think and what you would like to see. All suggestions and comments are gratefully received via the Backstage mailing list .
The site has been developed against the principles of linked open data and RESTful architecture where the creation of persistent URLs is a primary objective. The initial sources of data are somewhat limited but this will be extended over time.
Here's our mini-manifesto:
MusicBrainz is an online database of music information, maintained by an international community of dedicated enthusiasts. MusicBrainz collects details about recorded music, such as artist names, release titles, track lists, and the relationships between these things, and makes them available to the public.
All of the data in MusicBrainz is user-contributed and user-maintained, and freely available for use by the public. The BBC is working with MusicBrainz as a supplier of music information, and using MusicBrainz metadata to underpin the artist and album information on our site.
If you spot errors or omissions in the discographies contained on BBC Music artist pages or the tracklists on our review pages, we encourage you to edit or contribute this data by going to MusicBrainz and creating a free account . In the unlikely event that you have spotted something offensive on the discographies or tracklists, please contact us and let us know. If you have general queries about our use of third party data in this way, take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions
Artist biographies are, where available, being provided by Wikipedia - "the encyclopaedia that anyone can edit". Again if you spot any error we would encourage you to edit or contribute data directly at Wikipedia. However if you have spotted something offensive let us know .If you have general queries about our use of third party data in this way, take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions
We currently have the following types of top-level page in the beta release:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/:mbz_guid
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/:review_key
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/genres/:genre_key
The
:mbz_guid
for the artist pages is a Musicbrainz GUID. Our rationale for this is
to help provide persistent URLs and to ease integration with third party systems. If you would like
to know more about this please read Michael Smethurst’s post on the Radio Labs blog,
The Simple Joys of Web-Scale
Identifiers
.
Artist pages all have a number of subsidiary Resource pages, which expand on data available on the Artist page itself. They are available at URLs of the form:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/:mbz_guid/:resource
We have tried to ensure that each facet of information about an artist is independently addressable, and has its own resource. The following are the resources available from an individual artist page.
As with programmes we have made this data available in a variety of formats, including: XML, YAML, JSON, RDF, Atom and RSS. These are intended not as human-readable representations but to assist data applications working with music data. Indeed there is no guarantee that your browser will be able to display them.
The following representations are available:
/music/artists/a-z.rdf
/music/artists/a-z/by/:search.rdf
/music/artists/:mbz_guid.rdf
/music/reviews/:review_key.rdf
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/news.rss
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/reviews.rss
/music/reviews/latest.rss
/music/genres/:genre_key/reviews.rss
/music/artists/:mbz_guid.[xml|yaml|json]
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/promotions.[json]
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/credits.[xml|yaml|json]
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/relatedartists.[xml|yaml|json]
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/releases.[xml|yaml|json]
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/releases/[albums|singles|eps|...].[xml|yaml|json]
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/labels.[xml|yaml|json]
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/links.[xml|yaml|json]
/music/artists/:mbz_guid/wikipedia.[xml|yaml|json]
NB: Currently these are still in beta and future releases may break the current API.
We will also be implementing content negotiation so that user agents can choose which version fits their capabilities best.
Wikipedia content is licensed, by Wikimedia, under the (External) GNU Free Documentation Licence.
MusicBrainz data is licensed under the Creative Commons Public Domain and Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. For more information have a look at the (External) MusicBrainz Data Licences.
The BBC’s album reviews are licensed under an (External) Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons Licence. If you choose to use a review on your site please link back to the original page.
Our own data on the frequency with which individual artists are played by individual programmes is available in a variety of formats, including: XML, YAML, JSON, RDF, Atom and RSS (see Data representations for more information on this).
We make this data available under the licence we have developed for BBC Backstage. See the Backstage Terms of Use for details of this licence.
Meet the /music development team .
BBC © MMIX
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
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