BBC Music
BETA
We aim to provide a comprehensive guide to music content across the BBC. We are now expanding that service to provide comprehensive information about artists who appear on BBC programmes or who have been covered in bbc.co.uk/music's reviews.
We are also analysing the tracklists of some of our radio networks in order to provide information about when and where an artist has been played on the BBC, so our users can quickly and easily find the kind of shows that might suit their taste.
The phrase "beta" is often used to identify a project that's in the early stage of development. Read more about (External) a software release life cycle at Wikipedia.
For technical reasons we are currently only able to use tracklist information from certain BBC programmes, so our charts will not be completely representative of how many times a particular artist has been played, but we will be adding more stations as soon as it is possible to do so. Once we are confident that we are displaying a much more accurate and complete picture of the data, we'll remove the beta label.
We aim to provide a comprehensive guide to music content across the BBC. We are now expanding that service to provide comprehensive information about artists who appear on BBC programmes or who have been covered in bbc.co.uk/music's reviews.
Since hand-building a page for every artist heard on the BBC would be beyond our resources, we are taking basic data around names, discographies and other key information from (External) MusicBrainz , a website which offers discographical information on artists from Abba to Zappa (along with about 350,000 others). The information on the site is contributed, edited and maintained by an international community of users (including members of BBC staff involved in music broadcasting and content), in much in the same way as Wikipedia.
We know that many people using our website would like to find out more about artists, and basic biographical information is one of the key things that people expect to find on our pages. We feel that we provide best value to the licence fee payer by concentrating our resources on providing great original content (mainly through broadcast) and making it easy to find that content on the web. Biographies are a standardised type of content that are expected across thousands of artists. Wikipedia offers good quality biographies with very good coverage across artists. There are two good reasons to use this content rather than recreating similar content in-house or sourcing it from a commercial supplier:
Everybody is welcome to edit Wikipedia or MusicBrainz, and we are very keen to encourage experts among our users to contribute in this way. To edit MusicBrainz you will need to go through a simple registration process. Links are displayed on every artist page to edit entries for that artist in both places.
Our first resort is to rely on Wikipedia's own community and conventions which have generally proved robust in their response to vandalism. The Wikipedia policy on vandalism can be found here: (External) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vandalism . However, if it comes to our attention, for example via a user complaint, that there is a persistent problem with offensive or defamatory content being included from Wikipedia on any of our pages, we also have the option of suspending the inclusion of the biography on the page in question until we're satisfied that the problem has been solved. In the unlikely event that you have spotted something offensive on the discographies or tracklists, please contact us and let us know.
In a small fraction of the content we include in our pages from Wikipedia and MusicBrainz – specifically the names of artists, albums and tracks – there will be language that is offensive to some members of the audience. Context is a key factor in whether we choose to display such language in its original form, or to mask it by the use of asterisks. Our general principle is to avoid exposing users to such content accidentally, but not to censor it unduly.
In specific terms, wherever an artist name appears in a programme tracklist, search result or any other kind of aggregation we will mask it. However, where users have chosen to navigate to an artist's page we feel it would be unnecessary and patronising to continue to mask the offending words, for example within the text of a biography. Similarly, where there are profanities in track names we will not display them in the context of tracklists for programmes that play a variety of artists, but we do display them in album tracklists on a page for a release or an album review, where someone viewing the page already has a general expectation of tone based on the artist or artists involved, the genre, the album cover etc. And where there are profanities in album names we will not display them in lists such as a set of links to album reviews, but we will display them in artist discographies where, once again, users will have a general expectation of the territory they are in.
By doing this, we feel we are applying a proportionate level of editorial control to avoid offence to casual users, without undue censorship of objective facts which might offend the common sense of other members of our audience.
We are very keen to hear the views of our audience on our approach to publishing content around artists and albums. If you have a general comment, please contact us here . Please note that while we value your feedback we can't necessarily answer every comment or question that comes in.
If you have seen content that's defamatory or highly offensive, please use our complaints form and we will aim to respond as soon as possible.
If you are looking for a particular artist who's not featured on one of our pages, there are four ways to get to their page:
We provide a list of artists most played on BBC radio within the past seven days. We would like to stress that this data is not yet complete, and should not be taken as a full and accurate record of the music that the BBC has played. Certain networks and areas of networks' schedules are still under-represented within this data, and we are continuously working to make the data more reliable.
We also provide a ranking of programmes who play each artist on the BBC. This is based on the number of times an individual artist has been played on an individual programme divided by the average duration of the programmes that featured the artist, with more recent programmes. This is the best way we've yet identified to offer links to the programmes most likely to play the artist in question if you access the programme on demand and only have half an hour to listen. Once again, the same health warning applies. The data is not always complete and we are working to improve it.
If you wish to use feeds of this data to build your own content, please read our section on Rights .
Information for developers about our APIs and public sources can be found on the BBC Music developers page .
This website, its pages and the technical infrastructure that supports it are still being developed with a view to incrementally improving the functionality (the 'perpetual beta') and user experience over the coming months.
New views on the data will be introduced as this site develops allowing ever more ways to discover music across the BBC. In particular, we plan to:
Once again, we want to hear from you with your ideas and thoughts about what we should be doing with the BBC's music content online. If you have comments or ideas you would like to share, please contact us here. And again, while we value your feedback we can't necessarily answer every comment or question that comes in.
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 The URLs and a RESTful API ).
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.
We have separate FAQ sections for television and radio .
BBC © MMIX
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