In our day-to-day life, we constantly consume music, thanks to the marvelous creation of the streaming services (like Itunes, Spotify, and Apple Music). But have you ever thought about the technical aspect involved in the process?
Let’s jump right in!
- First, what are Music APIs?
Application Programming Interfaces, aka APIs, are tools that allow web developers to merge the music services database into their product (be it a website or an application). This gives developers the privilege of using the data and metadata of the music found in their libraries, including the genre of a project, the lyrics of the X song, information about the Y artists, etc.
- The Relevance Of APIs:
Okay, you might be wondering why you care about APIs, right?
Assuming you are an arising artist who just launched their website. Now, if you want to make your website a bit sophisticated, like to include one of your music videos, you could go, retrieve the embed code, and attach it to the website. But if you want to go deeper and do something that operates with the user input, you should be calling your programmers to deal with the backend coding, where they will surely be getting their hands dirty with APIs.
Not sure if you remember when Harry Styles dropped a cool quiz where fans had to write down their names in the quiz box, and the coded quiz would generate one of Harry’s songs to you. That was fully operating on music APIs. Oh! and we almost forgot to tell you that the Buzzfeed personality quizzes you and your friend do where each gets a different music suggestion is powered with APIs.
Or even music identifying applications like Shazam, which assist you in analyzing the song and directing you to the name of the song and the artist singing it, also use APIs to run their applications.
Nope, we’re still not done with APIs. Do you know what else could APIs be utilized for? Creating internet bots (robots) to perform human activities instead of actual humans. Despite the criticism directed towards the unethical aspect of the bots, many to this day still use them to maximize online growth.
Artists surely don’t need to know every tiny technical detail involved in the process. Still, it comes in handy to have a rough idea of using the available technologies for your benefit. Also, it is essential to keep communicating with the web development team to come up with revolutionary ideas to make sure that you are staying ahead in the game.
Below you can find a list of the 10 best music APIs:
- Last. FM
- Spotify
- iTunes
- Deezer
- SoundCloud
- Apple Music
- Musixmatch
- Shoutcast
- Mixcloud
- Chartmetric
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