iTunes Search vs Jamendo

The iTunes Search API is Apple's free, keyless lookup service for the iTunes Store and Apple Books catalog — music, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, and TV shows — searchable by term or looked up directly by ID. It's throttled to roughly 20 calls per minute per Apple's own guidance, with an Enterprise Partner Feed suggested for heavier volume, and every response comes back as JSON. The docs have moved off the long-dead affiliate.itunes.apple.com host (which no longer resolves) onto Apple's Performance Partners site, but the API itself, at itunes.apple.com/search, is unchanged and live.

Jamendo's API serves a catalog of roughly half a million independently released, Creative-Commons-licensed tracks, with over 20 read methods covering search, radios, and discovery plus write methods for managing a signed-in user's library. Reading the catalog only needs a free client_id issued on signup — full OAuth2 is reserved for the endpoints that act on a specific user's account — and responses can be requested as JSON, pretty-printed JSON, or XML. There's no published pricing tier for API access; it's free to use under Jamendo's terms.