iTunes Search vs Radio Browser

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.

Radio Browser is a free, keyless, community-maintained directory of internet radio stations — over 60,000 of them — with search, tagging by genre/country/language, click-tracking, and ready-to-play M3U playlists for any station. It's fully open source, mirrored across several independently-run servers behind a round-robin DNS entry point, and its maintainers explicitly ask API consumers to pick a random mirror rather than hammer one instance. Responses are available as JSON or XML, with a dedicated M3U format for playlist endpoints.