iTunes Search vs Phishin

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.

Phish.in is a free, listener-run archive of legal live Phish recordings, covering shows, tracks, songs, venues, and tours through its v2 REST API. Read endpoints (shows, tracks, search) are fully public and keyless — a plain GET against /api/v2/shows returns real data with no credentials at all — while account-scoped features like playlists and likes require a logged-in user. The project is open source and privately funded, with an MCP endpoint also available for AI-assistant clients.