I followed this Lynda tutorial to get a working Ionic App, and I also followed this Lynda tutorial to set up a MySQL backend with some PHP scripts (I highly recommend both tutorials, by the way!). Now I am trying to get my Ionic app connected to my MySQL database.
The Ionic app currently grabs data from js/data.json, which is just JSON data 
In app.js:
.controller('ListController', ['$scope', '$http', '$state',
    function($scope, $http, $state) {
    $http.get('js/data.json').success(function(data) {
      $scope.artists = data.artists;
    });
}]);
I wrote a PHP script that displays the exact same thing as data.json. I thought this would be a good first step towards bridging the gap between the two tutorials. 
in Load_Data.php:
 $response = "";
 //omitting code where I fill $response with all 
 //the same info as data.json
 $json = json_encode($response);
 printf("%s", $json);
I have compared the outputs of data.json and Load_Data.php and they are indeed identical. I have also used jsonlint to make sure that it is valid json. However, replacing js/data.json with js/Load_Data.php just makes all the data disappear with no console or server errors.
Also, when I try to go directly to js/Load_Data.php from the url, I immediately get redirected back to index.html, and the browser downloads the file instead of running it. I have no idea why this happens, because I have no code in that file other than encoding and printing the json data.
How can I fix my code so my Ionic app can access my MySQL database?
 
    