Top Music API Tools for Record Labels

Natalie Brooks

Jan 1, 2025

The music industry relies heavily on accurate, real-time data. Whether it's tracking artist popularity, optimizing A&R activities, or integrating artist information into various platforms, music APIs have become an indispensable tool for record labels and other industry stakeholders. In this article, we will explore some of the best music API services available today—Viberate, Soundcharts, and Chartmetric—and how they can help labels thrive.

Music API Use Cases

Music APIs offer various use cases that benefit different sectors of the music industry. Below are some specific examples of how music APIs are utilized:

• Talent Agencies: Talent agencies can use music APIs to automatically feed signature content, gig dates, and important metrics directly into artists' profiles. This automation saves time by eliminating the need for manual updates, making sure profiles are always up to date.
• Collecting Societies, Publishers, and Distributors: Music APIs also play a crucial role for collecting societies and publishers by offering data analytics, automatically feeding information into profiles, and enhancing internal reporting tools. They can use popularity metrics to analyze, rank, and present artists or tracks, improving overall service quality.
• App Developers: App developers often integrate music APIs to feed artist profiles, festival lineups, or chart data into their applications. For instance, Viberate's API allows you to integrate lineups from every festival, providing a seamless experience with automatically updated content.
• Labels: For music record labels, APIs have multiple use cases, such as discovering new talent. Labels can apply advanced A&R filters to Viberate's extensive database to source verified data, which helps enhance their internal tools. Music APIs also enable labels to access detailed insights, including artist growth and social engagement metrics, making talent scouting more effective.

The Best Music API Tools

While there aren't a lot of comprehensive music API tools on the market, three stand out as top choices for music industry professionals: Viberate, Soundcharts, and Chartmetric. Let's take a closer look at each service and how they compare.

Viberate Music API

Viberate's Music API provides daily-refreshed data on millions of artists, songs, playlists, festivals, and more, making it one of the most comprehensive music data solutions available.

• Data Coverage: Viberate covers the entire music ecosystem, with data on 11 million artists, 100 million tracks, 19 million playlists, 6,000 festivals, and 100,000 labels. This extensive coverage ensures labels have all the information they need in one place.
• Unique Artist IDs: One unique feature of Viberate is its artist profiles, which are curated to have no double entries. With Viberate, you get "one artist = one profile," ensuring accuracy and preventing confusion that might arise from duplicate profiles.
• Relevant Channels: Viberate provides APIs for TikTok, Spotify, YouTube Music, and more. You can access raw data points or let Viberate process them for you, giving you flexibility depending on your use case.
• Competitive Pricing: The platform offers pricing options that cater to early-stage startups and large enterprises, making Viberate’s Music API accessible to a wide range of users.

Viberate's Music API is ideal for record labels looking for a one-stop shop for artist data, social media metrics, and music analytics. The service is built to support a variety of use cases—whether for scouting talent, analyzing playlists, or integrating artist data into a larger application.

Soundcharts Music API

Soundcharts offers access to music data feeds at scale, with real-time insights and a focus on making fragmented data accessible to tech and data teams.

• Real-Time Data: Soundcharts provides real-time insights into 7 million artists, 80 million songs, and over 25,000 charts. The API offers a deep look into audience, radio airplay, and playlist data.
• Cross Data Integration: Soundcharts' API allows you to cross your proprietary data with Soundcharts data, adding value to activities such as A&R, financial planning, and customized chart analysis.
• Metadata Cleaning: The API includes metadata cleaning to handle inconsistencies in artist names, track titles, and more. This ensures that the data you receive is standardized and reliable, a crucial feature for any music label relying on accurate data.
• Historical Data: Soundcharts has been collecting data since 2014, allowing access to up to 5 years of social data and 4 years of radio airplay history. This historical perspective is helpful for analyzing trends over time.

Soundcharts is ideal for data-focused teams that need clean, standardized data across multiple platforms. Its focus on metadata cleaning and historical data makes it a suitable choice for labels that want to align their proprietary data with comprehensive music industry data.

Chartmetric Music API

Chartmetric offers a Developer API that provides programmatic access to a wide range of music data for software developers who want to build custom analytics solutions.

• Granular Control: Chartmetric's API offers granular control with flexible endpoints and filters, allowing labels to pull the specific data they need, including social, streaming, and audience insights.
• Pricing Based on Usage: Chartmetric provides a flexible pricing model, where API pricing depends on requests per second and is adjustable on a monthly basis. This makes it easier for smaller labels to manage costs.
• Data Share Options: In addition to the API, Chartmetric offers SQL access for developers who need direct access to its comprehensive music data. This is available on platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks.
• Audience Analytics: The API provides detailed audience analytics, which can be beneficial for labels that want to understand listener demographics and behavior patterns to drive marketing campaigns.

Chartmetric's Music API is a good option for labels that require granular control over their data extraction and wish to incorporate audience insights into custom analytics solutions. It also provides the flexibility to upgrade or downgrade API access monthly, making it adaptable to changing needs.

Verdict: Which Music API is Best for Record Labels?

When it comes to choosing the best music API for record labels, Viberate stands out as the most comprehensive solution. Here's why:

• Extensive Data Coverage: Viberate offers the most extensive coverage, with millions of artists, tracks, playlists, labels, and festivals, all accessible through one platform. For labels, having this wealth of data in one place is invaluable for optimizing both A&R and marketing efforts.
• One Artist = One Profile: The unique artist IDs offered by Viberate are a significant advantage, as they eliminate the confusion caused by duplicate profiles. This ensures that labels get accurate, verified data—a crucial aspect for talent scouting and market analysis.
• Relevant Channels and Competitive Pricing: Viberate provides APIs for all major streaming and social media platforms, including TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube Music. This diversity allows labels to understand artist performance across multiple channels. Additionally, the pricing is flexible, making it suitable for both small and large labels.

While Soundcharts is an excellent option for those needing real-time data and metadata cleaning, and Chartmetric offers flexible data access and audience analytics, Viberate provides the most well-rounded solution, covering the entire music ecosystem with competitive pricing and unique features.

If you're a record label looking to make the most out of your A&R efforts, integrate artist data into your applications, or monitor artist performance across streaming and social media, Viberate's Music API is the best choice to help you stay ahead in the competitive music industry.