As a hard-core fan of various kinds of music, I am always eager to know what’s new and popular on Billboard. Since I also play music and write music reviews myself, I need to analyze the latest hits on the website. But it can be time-consuming to copy and paste the list of songs manually, what should I do to speed up the process?

Thanks to Octoparse, I can complete the list crawling task with the help of the Billboard music scraper created by myself. In this article, I will demonstrate how web scraping works to crawl the hot 100 songs on Billboard. The same way is also feasible for scraping listings from websites of different industries.

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Build A Billboard Music Scraper in 3 Steps

Although I know nothing about coding, I can use Octoparse to set up my own Billboard music scraper in only 3 steps. What I intend to do is to extract the information about the hot 100 songs. Normally, I ought to visit Billboard.com, find the “Hot 100” section, enter the section, and start to copy and paste the data I need. Now, the whole process can be done with a scraping bot.

Step 1 Enter the URL of Billboard and Find the Music Listings You Would Like to Crawl

After launching the software and logging in, I need to enter the URL of Billboard, and click on “Start”.

After the webpage finishes loading in Octoparse’s built-in browser, I should click on the “Hot 100” section under the scraping mode, and select “Click URL” on the “Tips” panel.

Step 2 Generate the Workflow of Your Billboard Music Scraper

Now, I can click on “Auto-detect web data” to find data on the page automatically.

Then, I need to switch auto-detect results to the “hot 100” chart. Since the whole 100 songs are on the same page, and I can scrape while scrolling, it is not necessary to “Paginate to scrape more pages”. I just uncheck the box. After clicking on “Create workflow”, I manage to make the Billboard music scraper by myself.

Step 3 Run the Task You Build and Extract the Data

After saving the task, I am ready to run the task and extract the data I need. Hit “Run”, and Octoparse will start to work for me. Since I’m a premium user, I can choose to extract the data either on my local device or on the cloud.

Free users can only extract the data locally. Cloud extraction is available for those who go premium, which is more convenient that data can be saved to the cloud for easy access. Besides, the task can be scheduled to run at any time.

I decide to run the task on my device this time. Then, tada! The hot 100 songs data is extracted in seconds.

List Crawling Examples: What Kinds of Listings Are Most Frequently Scraped?

The process of scraping Billboard hot 100 songs is impressive. The same way can be applied to list crawling in a variety of industries. Let’s look at the most frequently scraped listings below.

Real Estate Listings

It is the most important thing to find a suitable house to rent when we move to a new city. Skimming through the real estate websites to check the house listings one by one is not a delightful experience. Gathering all the houses available for renting through web scraping can get rid of the tedious and repetitive manual work. For real estate agents, scraping the listings is also an efficient way to help satisfy their customers’ demands.

E-Commerce Product Listings

Product listings on e-commerce platforms are abundant resources for both merchants and customers. List crawling is so popular in the e-commerce industry that almost all store owners scrape product listings for price monitoring and market research. For e-commerce startups, product scraping is also beneficial for selecting potential products to sell and optimizing the business strategy.

Job Listings

Job seekers, especially fresh graduates, are frequent visitors to job search websites like Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc. Thousands of jobs across several niches are posted on these websites every day. For job searchers, scraping job listings can speed up the process of finding their dream job.

Travel Data and Hotel Listings

Although Covid-19 is still haunting, people who love traveling are always ready for a refreshing trip. By scraping travel data and hotel listings, travelers can pull down the needed web data and find destinations open to them currently. For travel agencies, list crawling in this industry offers a chance to track the tourists’ behaviors and understand their habits better.

Conclusion

The listings mentioned above can be scraped using Octoparse through both built-in templates and self-created crawlers. With the no-coding web scraping tool, list crawling in all industries is ready to go. Enjoy your journey with Octoparse, and feel free to contact us at support@octoparse.com if there are any problems.