iTunes Search vs Lyrics.ovh

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.

Lyrics.ovh is a small keyless lookup service: GET a artist/title pair against api.lyrics.ovh/v1 and it fans that query out in parallel across sources like Genius, AZLyrics, and Letras.mus.br, returning the first full lyric text found as plain JSON. There's no authentication, no request quota, and no dashboard — it's a single open-source Node project (github.com/NTag/lyrics.ovh) that anyone can also self-host. The stored Apiary docs mirror has gone dead (502), but the live API itself responded with real lyrics during this check and sends a wildcard CORS header.