download the lyrics for all of an artist's songs from genius

download_songs.py

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
import itertools
import sys
import os

def get_lyrics(url):
    page = requests.get(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text, "lxml")
    lyrics = soup.lyrics.getText()
    return lyrics.encode('ascii', 'ignore')

def get_songs(artist_id):
    url = 'http://api.genius.com/artists/%d/songs' % artist_id
    access_token = 'sJN8Itm9GbO3EsIZjObxk04wd4lzv6i8Kt-NiARvZ1XuPkos5HtMR6l3E5uFqLgb'
    print "Fetching songs..."
    for i in itertools.count(1):
        sys.stdout.write('.')
        sys.stdout.flush()
        params = {'access_token' : access_token, 'page' : i}
        r = requests.get(url, params=params)
        songs = r.json()['response']['songs']
        if not songs:
            print
            print "Songs fetched."
            return
        for song in songs:
            yield song

artist_id = 123 # Dre's id
song_urls = [song['url'] for song in get_songs(artist_id)]

print
print "Writing %d files..." % len(song_urls)

if not os.path.exists('data'):
    os.makedirs('data')
for url in song_urls:
    lyrics = get_lyrics(url)
    song_name = url[18:]
    filename = "data/" + song_name

    print song_name
    with open(filename, 'w') as f:
        f.write(lyrics)