Spotify killed their audio-features endpoint in 2024. We compared every replacement — MeloData, GetSongBPM, Cyanite, Soundcharts — on features, price, and developer experience.
The number every comparison article buries. Verified against published pricing pages 2026-05-24. Equivalent commercial volume tier — not free trials, not enterprise quotes.
| API | Cheapest commercial tier | Per 1k requests | vs FreqBlog Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| FreqBlog — Pro | £129/mo for 750k | £0.17 | — |
| AudD — volume tier | $1,800/mo for 500k | $3.60 | ~17× more |
| AudD — entry tier | $5/1k pay-as-you-go | $5.00 | ~24× more |
| MusicAPI.com — Business | €890/mo for 120k | €7.40 | ~37× more |
| Cyanite — per-track | $0.01/track upload | $10.00 | ~47× more (and upload-only) |
| Soundcharts — Enterprise | $250+/mo, custom quota | Custom (not published) | Different category (industry intel, not audio features) |
| GetSongBPM | Free with mandatory backlink | $0 | Cheaper, but BPM+key only — no mood/energy/genre/ISRC |
Spotify /audio-features |
Discontinued Nov 2024 | — | — |
USD→GBP at $1.25/£ (mid-2026). FreqBlog has lower tiers too (Hobbyist £9.99/mo = £0.67/k, Starter £39/mo = £0.26/k); above is the cheapest-vs-cheapest commercial comparison. GetSongBPM is genuinely cheaper but only returns BPM and key — not a feature-equivalent comparison.
/v1/audio-features/{id} — host-swap, identical path + JSON structure (numeric values use open-source analysis; see threshold guide). Raw Spotify track IDs resolve only for tracks already mapped to one (a minority of the catalog); for reliable coverage, look up by name (/lookup?track=&artist=) or ISRC (/v1/audio-features/{ISRC}) instead.The closest replacement for Spotify's audio-features — not just for English-language pop. No ISRC, no Spotify token, no per-track pricing — queryable by name, MCP-native, and actively maintained.
Solid technical product but the ISRC-only requirement is a dealbreaker for most projects. You need a different data source just to get ISRCs.
Great for simple BPM/key lookups but missing everything else. If all you need is tempo detection, it's a decent free option.
Purpose-built for mood and genre tagging at high accuracy. Excellent if that's your exact use case, overkill (and expensive) if you just need BPM/key.
Not really a music analysis API — it's a music industry intelligence platform. Wrong tool for audio features.
What we all used. Gone since November 2024. Spotify's February 2026 update made even Dev Mode require the app owner to hold an active Premium subscription, capped apps at 5 users each, and capped Client IDs per developer (1 at launch, raised to 25 in July 2026) — there is no replacement from Spotify.
FreqBlog now offers POST /identify — Chromaprint fingerprinting matched against the open AcoustID dataset — at £0.34 per 1k recognitions on Pro: ~12× cheaper than AudD's $5/1k entry rate, ~8× cheaper than their $3.60/1k volume rate. And when the matched recording is in our catalog, you get the full 43-field audio analysis in the same response.
A different category — built for apps that need a user's Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal libraries. Not a competitor for audio analysis. Even at their cheapest tier, ~80× more expensive per request than FreqBlog Pro.
A free public API for hobby projects. Fine for a weekend prototype; not appropriate for a paying product where uptime, support and a billing relationship matter.
One-on-one comparisons — verifiable facts only, including the honest cases where the other tool is the better fit.
Every music metadata API evaluated on 20+ criteria.
← scroll to compare all APIs →
| Feature | FreqBlog | MeloData | GetSongBPM | Cyanite | Soundcharts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lookup Method | |||||
| Name-based (artist + title) | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | Partial |
| ISRC lookup | ✓ | ✓ (required) | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| File upload / analyze | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Audio Features | |||||
| BPM / Tempo | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Musical Key + Mode | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Open Key / Camelot notation | ✓ | ✗ | Partial | ✗ | ✗ |
| Energy (0–1) | ✓ | Partial | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loudness (dBFS) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Danceability | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Valence / Positivity | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Acousticness (approx) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Instrumentalness (approx) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Speechiness (approx) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Time Signature | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Mood & Genre | |||||
| Mood (happy/sad/aggressive…) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Genre detection | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Advanced Endpoints | |||||
| Search by BPM range | ✓ /bpm | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Search by key (Camelot/Open) | ✓ /key | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| MCP server (AI/LLM integration) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Harmonic transition scoring (A→B mix compatibility) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| DJ set ordering (energy arc) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Recommendations + related artists (Spotify drop-in) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Pricing | |||||
| Free tier | ✓ 1,000 req/mo | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Entry paid tier | £9.99/mo | $0.002/req | Free only | $0.01/track | $250+/mo |
| Flat-rate monthly pricing | ✓ | ✗ (per req) | ✓ | ✗ (per track) | ✓ |
MeloData uses the same Essentia engine under the hood and produces accurate results. The fundamental problem is that it requires an ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) for every lookup. Most developer projects don't have ISRCs — they have track names and artist names.
To use MeloData you'd need to:
The FreqBlog API accepts artist + track title directly — the same interface Spotify provided. No preprocessing step, no extra API cost.
GetSongBPM is a well-known free resource that does name-based lookup well. If all you need is BPM and key, it's a reasonable choice. The problem is that it only returns two fields.
Spotify's audio-features returned 13 fields including energy, loudness, danceability, valence, acousticness, instrumentalness, liveness, speechiness and time signature. GetSongBPM returns none of those. If your app used any of those fields, you'll need a different solution.
When a track isn't in our catalog, we check multiple curated datasets of pre-analyzed music. These datasets originated from academic and community music-information-retrieval research and are released under open licenses.
The FreqBlog API uses an intelligent multi-source fallback chain. When a track is in the catalog (1,488,347+ pre-analyzed), you get a response in ~25–40ms with keep-alive (p95 under 100ms). For everything else, the API checks multiple public databases (mood, mood_vector, genre, valence, and more). Total fallback coverage: 8M+ tracks. The mood_vector field (5-axis dimensional mood probabilities) is populated when a match is found — for both fallback and catalog tracks — and is null when no match exists.
No other commercial music API offers this combination of instant lookups with intelligent multi-source fallback.
No credit card. No ISRC. Same fields Spotify gave you, plus more.
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