Week 6 Assignment (Part 2 - Exercise)
Accessing the Apple iTunes Search Service
In this assignment you are going to build a Python program to access the Apple iTunes Search Service. This service can be used to search information about musicians, albums, songs and so on.
Using the following URL, a search for the term ramones and for the entity type album is performed: https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=ramones&entity=album
Other possible entity types are musicArtist, musicTrack or song. Below is an (abbreviated) example result of the service:
{
"resultCount": 1,
"results": [
{
"wrapperType": "collection",
"collectionType": "Album",
"artistId": 60715,
"amgArtistId": 5223,
"artistName": "Ramones",
"collectionName": "Ramones",
"collectionPrice": 9.99,
"collectionExplicitness": "notExplicit",
"trackCount": 14,
"copyright": "℗ 1976 Sire Records. Marketed by Rhino Entertainment Company, a Warner Music Group Company.",
"country": "USA",
"currency": "USD",
"releaseDate": "1976-04-23T08:00:00Z",
"primaryGenreName": "Punk"
}
]
}The response in the example above consists of one result (resultCount is 1).
This result is the album “Ramones” (element collectionName) by the artist “
Ramones” (element artistName). The response is in JSON format.
The Requests library can be
used to invoke the Apple iTunes Search Service. In order to perform a search,
a GET request
needs to be performed. This is done using the get() function of the Requests
library. After that, the method json() of the Requests library can be used
to map the response from JSON to the
Python 🐍 data types dict and list.
Assignment
Write a program that asks the user for a search term. Perform a search using the iTunes search service for the entity type album. The program should then print how many search results where returned. For each result print the artist name, the album name and track count.
Below is an example execution of the program. Note that the output is abbreviated.
Please enter a search term: cash
The search returned 50 results.
Artist: Luke Bryan - Album: Crash My Party - Track Count: 13
Artist: Johnny Cash - Album: The Essential Johnny Cash - Track Count: 36
Artist: Dave Matthews Band - Album: Crash - Track Count: 12