Free APIMediaNo keyOfficial

Cover Art Archive

Free album artwork for any MusicBrainz release: front/back covers plus 250/500/1200px thumbnails by MBID, no key.

The Cover Art Archive (CAA) is a joint MetaBrainz / Internet Archive project hosting community-curated cover art for MusicBrainz releases. Given a MusicBrainz release or release-group MBID, it returns a JSON manifest of images (front/back flags, type, comments, approved) with direct CDN URLs and pre-rendered thumbnails at 250/500/1200px. No key, no auth. It is the natural artwork companion to MusicBrainz: resolve a release to an MBID there, then fetch covers here.

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Free tier

Free. JSON manifests served via MusicBrainz; images served via the Internet Archive CDN. No key required.

Rate limits

No published hard number. The JSON metadata endpoints sit behind MusicBrainz infrastructure, so apply the same courtesy (~1 req/s) and send a descriptive User-Agent; image/CDN fetches are more lenient.

Auth

No key

Base URL

https://coverartarchive.org/

What you'd build with it

Fetch album artwork for a track/release already resolved to a MusicBrainz MBID
Generate cover thumbnails (250/500/1200) for a music UI without storing images
Enrich a now-playing / playlist card with high-res front covers
Batch-download artwork for a catalogue keyed by MBID

Key endpoints

GET/release/{mbid}JSON manifest of all cover images for a release MBID, with 250/500/1200 thumbnail URLs.
GET/release-group/{mbid}Cover art for a release-group (uses the representative release's art).
GET/release/{mbid}/front302-redirect straight to the front-cover image (append -250/-500/-1200 for a size).
GET/release/{mbid}/{image-id}-500.jpgFetch a specific image at a fixed thumbnail size (250/500/1200).

Members

Members get the runnable recipe

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