With Python tools like Beautiful Soup, developers can scrape and parse data directly from web pages to use for their projects and applications. This allows them to access a wide variety of information programmatically, even if it's not available through a dedicated REST API. The article uses an example of scraping MIDI data from the internet to train a neural network with Magenta that can generate classic Nintendo-sounding music. It covers setting up dependencies, getting familiar with Beautiful Soup, parsing and navigating HTML, downloading files, and provides a practical example of using Beautiful Soup to scrape data from the Video Game Music Archive. The article emphasizes the importance of keeping code up-to-date as changes to web pages' HTML might break it, and encourages readers to explore possibilities for working with scraped data, such as cleaning it up or training neural networks.