Is this possible to do with programming?

[delnabo]

My client has a radio station and he needs a tool to find out the most viewed music YouTube videos by musical genre. He needs this in order to find new songs that are having success on YouTube but are still not on the radio.

Does anyone know if such a tool already exists? If not, is it possible for a programmer to create it? I guess sorting the results by musical genre would be the challenge, as YouTube does not offer subcategories within the music category.

Also, does anyone know if it's possible to find out itunes best sellers by genre?

 

[``Yousef]

I've never dealt with external iTunes programming, so I can't really comment on it, but as for the YouTube idea that would be possible.

It might not work perfectly, but it would certainly be relatively possible by using the YouTube API and cutting down to fine-tuned search parameters to retrieve a list of which the majority would be new songs with large views/comments/etc, within the music category - and then by extension of using the video title, the musical genre through some external API or scraping method, e.g. let's say the title is "Kid Rock - Some Random Title", it would look up the title on something like Last.fm, then use that to pick-up the artist name, the artist profile, and then the musical genre of the artist.

The bottom line is; it all comes down to logic and formulas. It's not whether or not it can be done, but the best way to do it, as you'll ever be able to get 100% accuracy because YouTube themselves don't provide the parameters of a sub-category, but you'll be able to get as close as possible to by trying to figure out the most effective and efficient logic to do so.

You might find that it would be more efficient for your friend to split the work between the program and himself, saving himself time and money in both the short and long term; as it may be a lot more accurate for him to simply look through results, and find out the genre himself for something that's getting a LOT of plays.

Note: The way that I'd do it above is something I came up with in my head in like 2 minutes, and was more of an illustration as thinking about it now I definitely wouldn't do it that way.