title: youtube-dl: Failed to parse JSON
body: <p>I posted a question on this yesterday to the GitHub support page and it got flagged as a duplicate - the original answer is <a href="https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26362" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>. This issue doesn't automatically fix like it did for that user. Instead, it seems to come and go with no pattern, so I don't have a good way to replicate it. Some songs will work at one point in time, then they won't a couple minutes later.</p>
  <p>Error:</p>
  <pre><code>[debug] Encodings: locale cp1252, fs utf-8, out UTF-8, pref cp1252
  [debug] youtube-dl version 2020.09.20
  [debug] Python version 3.7.8 (CPython) - Windows-10-10.0.19041-SP0
  [youtube:search] query &quot;iron man 3 song&quot;: Downloading page 1
  [debug] exe versions: none
  [debug] Proxy map: {}
  ERROR: query &quot;song name&quot;: Failed to parse JSON  caused by JSONDecodeError('Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)')); please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
  
  </code></pre>
  <p>I get the issue when attempting to extract the data from the video. Here is a snippet of the code I am using:</p>
  <pre><code>ydlOps = {
      'format': 'bestaudio/best',
      'outtmpl': './%(title)s.webm',
      'noplaylist': True,
      'extractaudio': True,
      'audioformat': 'webm',
      'default_search': 'ytsearch1',
      'quite': True,
      'verbose':True,
      'version': True
  }
  </code></pre>
  <pre><code>        with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(ydlOps) as downloader:
              songData = downloader.extract_info(url, download=download)
  </code></pre>
  <p>I have changed the options, tried other options said to have worked, and nothing seems to make a difference. Some will work, then not, then they will again.</p>