The Odesli API in 2026: Retired, and the Alternative I Built

I first published this on 23 July 2026, when the public Odesli API still answered. Coverage was already thin: no Apple Music, no YouTube. Eight days later Linktree retired the whole v1-alpha.1 namespace. I retested it this morning. The honest FAQ from July ("is it down? No") is now wrong, so this is the correction.

If you want the shorter news version, that is The song.link API is dead. The website is not.

What I get today

On 22 September 2026 I called https://api.song.link/v1-alpha.1/links with a normal Spotify track, the same call I made in July.

HTTP 401
{"statusCode":401,"code":"PUBLIC_API_ACCESS_DEPRECATED"}

api.odesli.co returns the same body. The public API is closed. Linktree's help article from 21 May 2026 said requests would return 410 Gone after 31 July. What I get is 401 with that error code, and either way there is nothing to parse.

The song.link and odesli.co websites still load. This post is about the API developers actually called.

What I measured in July, while it still answered

On 21 July 2026 at 13:33 UTC both test calls succeeded. Valid JSON, a pageUrl, a set of platform links, no errors and no rate-limit wall. The problem was the payload.

Plenty of smaller stores. No Apple Music, no YouTube, no SoundCloud. For a product that promises "open this anywhere", that is a broken feature wearing a 200.

That was the last clean measurement I have from before the cutoff. You cannot reproduce it now, because the endpoint no longer returns links.

The commercial terms never caught up

While the API was public, three constraints sat on anyone building a real integration.

There was no self-serve paid plan, no page where you entered a card and got a higher, guaranteed rate limit. For a hobby script that is fine. For a product with a roadmap, "email us and hope" is a bad dependency.

Throughput sat around 10 requests per minute. Comfortable for occasional lookups, uncomfortable the moment a chat bot or a bulk importer hit it.

And there was an attribution requirement. Reasonable for a free public service, and a constraint some products would rather pay to remove.

Linktree's allowlist still exists if you have a partner relationship. For everyone else the public door is shut, and those terms are now historical.

The alternative: an ISRC-first music link API, open for testing

SongPort started as a free consumer converter. You can still paste a link at songport.link and get a universal page in a few seconds. Background on the format: how universal music links actually work. Free-tool roundup: smart link tools.

The engine under that converter is what I am opening as an API. It matches on ISRC first, the International Standard Recording Code every commercially released recording carries. ISRC identifies the recording, not a fuzzy title-and-artist guess. When a platform exposes one, the match is exact. When it does not (YouTube has no ISRC to match on), I fall back to title matching and flag that link as a search fallback, so you always know what you got.

Here is the difference on the same Spotify track from the July test, now against a dead Odesli endpoint:

You do not have to take the table on faith. The SongPort developers page runs a live demo against the same code path a paying key hits. Paste a link and read every field.

What "open" and "tested" mean here

The API is open, but it is a testing phase, not a finished product. Keys are issued by hand right now, on purpose. That lets me watch every conversion, see where matching is strong and where it is not, and fix it against real traffic before I turn on self-serve billing. If you want in, the waitlist is on the developers page.

The scope is single tracks, labelled honestly. This resolves individual recordings across the major platforms. Playlists, albums, and podcasts are out of scope today. YouTube links come from title matching, so I mark them as good rather than guaranteed. When a catalogue does not carry a track, you get a search URL, not a fabricated deep link.

Request and response shapes live in the API documentation. It is a server-to-server API. Your key lives in your backend, never in browser code, never in an iOS Shortcut.

Who this is for

You are a fit for the SongPort API if:

• You had an Odesli integration, and it started returning 401 after 31 July 2026.
• You need Apple Music and YouTube in the response, reliably.
• Ten requests per minute was already a wall, even before the shutdown.
• You would rather integrate against an API whose schema I treat as a promise.

If you only needed the occasional personal page, song.link still makes those. So does SongPort, with no account.

How this sits next to the rest

If you are weighing options at the consumer level rather than the API level, I keep a comparison of free music smart link tools, and a separate look at the best smart link tool for indie artists in 2026. For turning a Spotify link into an Apple Music link, there is a dedicated Spotify to Apple Music guide.

Try it against your own link

Take a Spotify track that matters to you. Call Odesli if you still want to see the 401. Then paste the same link into the SongPort demo. If Apple Music and YouTube matter to your product, the difference is one test.

When you are ready to build on it, join the API waitlist on the developers page and read the API docs.