Genius API
Search Genius's song database and pull rich song metadata and annotation references with a free, non-expiring token.
The Genius API lets you search its song database and fetch detailed song metadata: titles, primary/featured artists, album, release date, artwork, stats, the public song URL, and references to crowd-sourced annotations (the 'meaning' of lyric lines). Auth is OAuth 2.0, but for read-only use you generate a free Client Access Token on the API Clients page that does not expire and pass it as a bearer token. Important: the API returns metadata and annotation references, NOT the full lyrics text (those are scraped from the song page by libraries like lyricsgenius, which is a TOS gray area).
Free tier
Free. Register an API client and generate a non-expiring Client Access Token for read-only endpoints. No paid tier for standard use.Rate limits
Not officially published. No documented per-minute number; throttle conservatively and cache responses.Auth
OAuthBase URL
https://api.genius.com/What you'd build with it
- Search for a song and resolve it to its Genius song ID and public URL
- Fetch song metadata (album, release date, artwork, artist credits)
- Surface crowd-sourced annotation references for lyric-meaning features
- List an artist's catalogue ordered by popularity
Key endpoints
- GET
/search?q={query}Search songs; returns hits with song id, title, primary artist, and URL. - GET
/songs/{id}Full song metadata: album, release date, stats, artwork, annotation refs. - GET
/artists/{id}Artist details: name, image, alternate names, social links. - GET
/artists/{id}/songsList songs for an artist, sortable by popularity or release date.
Members get the runnable recipe
Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.