artistfetcher

I was a little annoyed that some of the indie artists I follow on YouTube Music were removing some of their songs from the platform. Besides that, I was also frustrated that we don't really own much these days; if YouTube, Spotify, or others decide to shut down their servers, they can.

So, I created this simple Python script that compiles (doesn't necessarily download) all publications of a desired artist into a JSON file. This makes it easy to fetch more information from there. The JSON file design allows users to download content in whatever way they prefer. Here's an example of a line from this file:

{
  "artist_name":      "Korn",
  "artist_browse_id": "UCdSgOgQ0WtelXBMKF3tDsqg",
  "song_title":       "Love & Meth",
  "song_video_id":    "851NxKsneFk",
  "album_title":      "The Paradigm Shift",
  "album_browse_id":  "MPREb_UUPBhNFZYrL",
  "local_path":       "Korn/Albums/The_Paradigm_Shift"
}

It's as simple as that. Now you can use jq, or your favorite programming language, to interpret the data and download the song wherever you want. There's even a local_path attribute with sanitized directory names that might be useful for you!

Note

Check out the download.sh script — you can use it to download all songs from an artist into a specific target folder. Feel free to use it as a template for your own scripts! If you think of something useful to add, like a script that fetches song lyrics, don't hesitate to make a pull request here. ❤️

Steps to run this script

1. Make sure you have the ytmusicapi Python package installed. Run python3 -m pip install ytmusicapi to install it.
2. Run the main.py script and pass the artist's name you want to search for. Once it finishes, it will generate a [ARTIST NAME].json file in the current directory.

Now you have all the data from this specific artist in one file. If you want to download everything, you can use the helper download.sh script, which uses the yt-dlp tool.

3. Run ./download.sh . ~/Music — the first argument is where all the .json files are located, and the second argument is the path where everything should be downloaded.

Reference Manual

Usage: artistfetcher [-h] [--target TARGET] [query ...]

Positional arguments:

• [query]: The artist search query.

Options:

• -h, --help: Show this help message and exit.
• --target, -t TARGET: Directory where the artist's JSON files should be stored.