billboard.py

billboard.py is a Python API for accessing ranking charts from Billboard.com.

Installation

To install with pip, run

pip install billboard.py

You can also clone this repository and run python setup.py install.

Quickstart

To download a Billboard chart, we use the ChartData() constructor.

Let's fetch the current Hot 100 chart.

>>> import billboard
>>> chart = billboard.ChartData('hot-100')

Now we can look at the chart entries, which are of type ChartEntry and have attributes like artist and title:

>>> song = chart[0]  # Get no. 1 song on chart
>>> song.title       # Get the title
u'Hello'
>>> song.artist      # Get the artist
u'Adele'
>>> song.weeks       # Get number of weeks on chart
4

We can also easily pretty-print the entire chart with:

print chart

which as of 29 November 2015 gives:

hot-100 chart (current)
-----------------------
1. 'Hello' by Adele (0)
2. 'Sorry' by Justin Bieber (+1)
3. 'Hotline Bling' by Drake (-1)
4. 'Love Yourself' by Justin Bieber (Hot Shot Debut)
5. 'What Do You Mean?' by Justin Bieber (+1)
6. 'The Hills' by The Weeknd (-2)
7. 'Stitches' by Shawn Mendes (-2)
8. '679' by Fetty Wap Featuring Remy Boyz (-1)
9. 'Wildest Dreams' by Taylor Swift (-1)
10. 'Here' by Alessia Cara (+1)
# ... 90 more lines

Full documentation

Downloading a chart

Use the ChartData constructor to download a chart:

ChartData(name, date=None, fetch=True, all=False)

The arguments are:

• name – The chart name, e.g. 'hot-100' or 'pop-songs'. You can browse the Charts section of Billboard.com to find valid chart names; the URL of a chart will look like http://www.billboard.com/charts/CHART-NAME (example).
• date – The chart date as a string, in YYYY-MM-DD format. If this argument is omitted (or is None), the latest chart will be fetched. Again, the best way to find valid dates is by browsing the Billboard website. For the Hot 100 chart, an example of a valid date is '2015-11-28', which gets this chart. If this argument is invalid, no exception will be raised; instead, the chart will contain no entries.
• fetch – A boolean indicating whether to fetch the chart data from Billboard.com immediately (at instantiation time). If False, the chart data can be populated at a later time using the fetchEntries() method.
• all – Deprecated; has no effect.

Walking through chart dates

Every ChartData instance has a previousDate attribute containing a string representation of the previous chart's date. You can feed this into another ChartData instance to effectively walk back through previous charts.

from time import sleep

import billboard

chart = billboard.ChartData('hot-100')
while chart.previousDate:
    doSomething(chart)
    chart = billboard.ChartData('hot-100', chart.previousDate)
    sleep(2)  # Throttle requests

Accessing chart entries

If chart is a ChartData instance, we can ask for its entries attribute to get the chart entries (see below) as a list.

For convenience, chart[x] is equivalent to chart.entries[x], and ChartData instances are iterable.

Chart entry attributes

A chart entry (typically a single track) is of type ChartEntry. A ChartEntry instance has the following attributes:

• title – The title of the track.
• artist – The name of the artist, as formatted on Billboard.com. If there are multiple artists and/or featured artists, they will all be included in this string.
• peakPos – The track's peak position on the chart, as an int.
• lastPos – The track's position on the previous week's chart, as an int. This value is 0 if the track has never been on the chart before.
• weeks – The number of weeks the track has been on the chart. This value is 1 if the track is new on the chart.
• rank – The track's current position on the chart.
• change – A string indicating how the track's position has changed since the previous week. This may be one of the following:
  • A signed integer like +4, -1, or 0, indicating the difference between the track's current position and its position on the previous week's chart.
  • 'Hot Shot Debut', which means track is the highest-rated track that is completely new to the chart.
  • 'New', which means the track is completely new to the chart, yet not the highest rated new track.
  • 'Re-Entry', which means the track is re-entering the chart after leaving it for at least a week.
• spotifyID – The Spotify ID of the track, or an empty string if it was not provided. This can be used to access more information about the track via the [Spotify Web API](https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/get-tr ack/).
• spotifyLink – The Spotify embed URL of the track, generated from the spotifyID. Will be an empty string if no such ID was provided.

More resources

For additional documentation, take a look at the source code for billboard.py, or use Python's interactive help feature.

If you're stuck or confused: This is a small project, so you can also just email me (Allen). My contact info is on my profile page.

Contributing

Found a bug? Create an issue here.

Pull requests are welcome! Please adhere to the following style guidelines:

• In general, follow PEP 8. You may ignore E501 ("line too long") and E127 ("continuation line over-indented for visual indent") if following them would detract from the readability of the code. Use your best judgement!
• We use mixedCase for variable names.
• All-uppercase words remain all-uppercase when they appear at the end of variable names (e.g. downloadHTML not downloadHtml).

Running tests

Install tox and nose.

To run all of the tests, run

nosetests

Assuming you have both Python 2.7 and 3.4 installed on your machine, you can also run

tox

to run tests on both versions; see tox.ini for configuration details.

Dependencies

• Beautiful Soup 4
• Requests

License

• This project is licensed under the MIT License.
• The Billboard charts are owned by Prometheus Global Media LLC. See Billboard.com's Terms of Use for more information.