How to Scrape NetEase Cloud Music with Python: A Step‑by‑Step Guide

Introduction

Many music sites require a VIP subscription to download songs, so I explored a free method using a Python web scraper to retrieve tracks from NetEase Cloud Music.

Implementation Details

The process consists of four main steps: locating the music on the server, sending HTTP requests, extracting the desired file links, and downloading the files.

import requests  # send network request library

pip install requests

from lxml import etree  # data parsing library

pip install lxml

url = 'https://music.163.com/#/discover/toplist?id=3778678'

response = requests.get(url=url)  # request page data

html = etree.HTML(response.text)  # parse page data

id_list = html.xpath('//a[contains(@href,"song?")]')  # all song id collection

base_url = 'http://music.163.com/song/media/outer/url?id='  # download music URL prefix

for data in id_list:
    href = data.xpath('./@href')[0]
    music_id = href.split('=')[1]  # music id
    music_url = base_url + music_id  # download music URL
    music_name = data.xpath('./text()')[0]  # music name
    music = requests.get(url=music_url)
    with open('./music/%s.mp3' % music_name, 'wb') as file:
        file.write(music.content)
        print('<%s>下载成功' % music_name)

Pitfalls Encountered

The original video‑based method stopped working because the site added anti‑scraping defenses, causing missing music_name and music_id values and returning a "network congested" error (code -460) for some IDs.

base_url = 'http://music.163.com/song/media/outer/url?id='
music_id = '1804320463.mp3'
music_url = base_url + music_id
music = requests.get(url=music_url)
print(music.text)

The response shows

{"msg":"网络太拥挤，请稍候再试！","code":-460,"message":"网络太拥挤，请稍候再试！"}

, indicating the server blocked the request.

base_url = 'http://music.163.com/song/media/outer/url?id='
music_id = '1804320463.mp3'
music_url = base_url + music_id
print(music_url)

Printing the URL still allows manual playback and download via a browser, suggesting the API endpoint works when accessed directly.

Conclusion

Websites rapidly adopt advanced anti‑scraping mechanisms, so scraping music files is no longer straightforward. This article shares my learning experience with Python web scraping and invites readers to suggest solutions for bypassing the current obstacles.