I've come to realize I don't discover enough new bands as I'd like, and even worse, I'm not always aware of when a new album from a band I like comes out. The three ways I discover new bands are from local gigs in my city, the charts list on the left of this site, or the awards here every February. The problem with gigs is I rarely go if I don't recognize a band performing. The awards are overwhelming because there are so many nominations to listen to in one month's time to responsibly vote (much less devote the time to enjoy as intended), so that leaves the Hot Album Charts here on the site.
This morning I woke up with a random as hell idea. I created a simple Python script that reads the
Hot Albums page. It parses out the 15 artists and albums listed, goes to YouTube and finds the most played song on each album, and creates
a playlist with those 15 songs for me to listen to.
I could run this automatically every week so that I get a fresh playlist with new bands or new songs if a different song from an album supersedes another's play count. If I set it up to run every Monday, it'll give me a reason to be excited for Mondays and hopefully discover new and exciting bands more frequently!
If anyone is intrigued by the idea and has any suggestions, please let me know! I'm thinking about maybe modifying it to include the top two most played songs from each album just in case the most played is a bit of a dud but the second most is a banger. What other improvements could I make?
Furthermore, if you're an MS staff member and there's an API I can reference to get the top 15 albums instead of scraping your site, let me know, please. All I'm currently doing is making one request to the link I posted above and using a Python library to parse the HTML so I can rip out the artist and album names. An API would make it easier and more resilient in case you change your HTML down the road.
