Jamendo vs Lyrics.ovh

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.

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.