`urllib` has some nice things for this sort of work:

```
>>> import urllib
>>> track = 'Union Square'
>>> artist = 'Tom Waits'
>>> params = {'orderby': 'relevance', 'start-index': 1, 'max-results': 1, 'v': 2, 'alt': 'jsonc'}
>>> params.update(q='%s %s' % (track, artist))
>>> base_url = 'https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?%s'
>>> base_url % urllib.urlencode(params)
'https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?orderby=relevance&max-results=1&q=Union+Square+Tom+Waits&v=2&start-index=1&alt=jsonc'
```