iTunes Search API

Implementation notes

When to use iTunes Search API

The iTunes Search API is Apple's public catalog search — music, podcasts, movies, TV, audiobooks, and iOS and Mac apps — with no key, no signup, and no terms click-through. It is the standard way to resolve a podcast name to its RSS feed URL, which is why virtually every podcast client and directory on the internet calls it. It is also a fast route to album artwork, App Store metadata, and per-country store availability. Use it for podcast tooling, music search boxes, app metadata dashboards, and link resolution between stores. Do not build a business on it as a primary data source: it is an ancient, effectively undocumented endpoint that Apple maintains for affiliate partners, with no versioning, no changelog, no status page, and no support channel. It has worked reliably for well over a decade, which is the only real assurance you get, and there is no contract behind that.

Common pitfalls

• The response Content-Type is text/javascript, not application/json — a leftover from the endpoint's JSONP era. Strict clients and typed deserializers that key off Content-Type refuse to parse it, so some Java, .NET, and Swift stacks hand you a raw string or throw. Read the body as bytes and parse it explicitly rather than relying on content negotiation.
• Artwork comes back at 100x100bb, which is unusable in a modern UI. The universally-used workaround is string replacement: swap 100x100bb for 600x600bb (or 1000x1000bb) inside the artworkUrl100 value and the CDN serves the larger asset. This is entirely undocumented, has worked for a decade, and could stop tomorrow — fall back to the original URL if the upsized one 404s.
• The country parameter is a catalog switch, not a language switch. country=US and country=DE return different result sets, different track IDs for some titles, and different availability. The default is US regardless of where the request originates, so European users get the US catalog unless you pass country explicitly on every call.
• The commonly-cited ceiling is around 20 requests per minute per IP, which is not documented anywhere authoritative and is enforced by silently returning zero results rather than a 429. That means an empty resultCount is ambiguous: it might be a genuine miss, or it might be throttling. Cache aggressively, back off when results suddenly go empty, and never treat resultCount 0 as definitive.

Quick start (bash)

# resolve a podcast name to its RSS feed URL - the classic use case
curl -s 'https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=darknet+diaries&entity=podcast&limit=1' | jq -r '.results[0].feedUrl'
# artwork upsize trick: the URL ends in /100x100bb.jpg - swap for 600x600bb.jpg
curl -s 'https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=radiohead&entity=album&country=GB&limit=1' | jq -r '.results[0].artworkUrl100'

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