Querying https://musicbrainz.org for all artists

Question

How can I query for all artists who were born after 1720 and died before 1900 on https://musicbrainz.org?

I need to retrieve their IDs and some information about them. Is it possible to get data in JSON format?

Answer 1

for those who dont want to read a long post, here is everything the OP asked for in only one query:

http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/?query=begin:[1720 TO 1900] AND end:[1720 TO 1900] AND type:"person"&fmt=json

This should return perfect results, and has got to be the best answer possible. - all artists, born after 1720 and dead before 1900, in json format, which retrieves their IDs, and lots of information about them...

The explanation and thought process:

Since Brian's currently accepted answer includes a link to the API document, i can say it is technically complete but I don't consider pointing to the spec a the best possible answer, and can be greatly improved.

Firstly it is easy to return json by adding the json format parameter.

&fmt=json

Secondly while i don't reckon there where many boy bands back in the day, given that OP is asking about births and deaths we may conclude they are interested in only people rather than groups other types of artists.

AND type:"person"

At which point as Brian suggests another call for each end date and then filter the results taking only those who died by 1900.

If you did this you would need to do way more than 180 searches the best answer suggests, but rather one for each birth and each death year combination, so technically 1720 to 1720, all the way through 1900-1900, my math stinks but that is thousands of searches.

But what makes this still such a horrible search is because sometimes dates are either written with only the year, and then sometimes written with month date and year, so for example if you search for begin 1929 and end 1900

So if a date is written to include not only year but month/date you would not get any results for this artist because of the full birthday:

ex:

id "2b8a16a9-468f-49b0-93ea-5e6726f41643" type "Person" life-span
begin "1929-11-10" end "1990" ended true

Therefore in order to get any good results using only the year you would need to add the fuzzy search syntax

musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/?query=begin:1960~ AND end:1990~ AND type:"person"&fmt=json

But this does nothing to solve big problem of the magnitude of searches suggested, so knowing its LUCENS based I decided to learn some LUCENS, and realize there is range syntax:

Therefor you can do all of the above with one query:

http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/?query=begin:[1720 TO 1900] AND end:[1720 TO 1900] AND type:"person"&fmt=json

PS I recommend to start adding quotes or even url encoding your parameter values to prevent breakage. For example leaving quotes off begin and end numerals in the example above has no problem but off the type value will fail.

Answer 2

First, Musicbrainz only returns XML, as far as I know, so you'll have to convert the results to JSON.

To answer your question, it doesn't look like you'll be able to get the data you want in a single call. (The following is based off the XML Web Service Search documentation.)

This call will retrieve all artists who were born in a given year:

http://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/?query=begin:1720

I believe you'd need to write 180 calls (one for each year between 1720 and 1900) to get the data you need. You'd also need to manually filter out artists who died after 1900, by looking at the <end> node within <life-span>. This is because the end field will only get you artists who died in a specific year.