The song.link API is dead. The website is not.

On 22 September 2026 I called https://api.song.link/v1-alpha.1/links with an ordinary Spotify track, the same kind of request a Shortcut or a Discord bot would make. This is what came back:

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

api.odesli.co returned the same body. That is the public API developers actually called, and it is gone.

The song.link and odesli.co websites still load. If you paste a track into the website, you still get a page. If your iOS Shortcut, Discord bot, or backend hits the API, you get a 401.

What Linktree actually announced

Linktree bought Songlink / Odesli in 2021. On 21 May 2026 they published Sunsetting the Songlink (Odesli) public API.

The v1-alpha.1 namespace, served from api.song.link and api.odesli.co, would be fully retired on 31 July 2026. After that date, they said, every request would return 410 Gone.

What I get today is 401 with PUBLIC_API_ACCESS_DEPRECATED. Different status, same outcome: no public access.

They were explicit about the website. song.link and album.link landing pages stay up, because those are the pages people share. The API was the thing developers called from Shortcuts, bots, and backends.

The reason they gave is that high-volume automated traffic was making the matching behind the free pages unreliable. Closing the public API was how they kept those pages fast. Partners with a real integration can still apply for an allowlist. There is no self-serve paid plan on that form.

What actually broke

The website did not vanish. A pile of tools that quietly depended on the API did.

iOS Shortcuts that converted Spotify links to Apple Music by calling api.song.link now fail with "can't find API matches". Threads on r/shortcuts are full of people rewriting the lookup with Spotify oEmbed and the iTunes Search API, which is a worse matcher and still a hack.

Discord bots that watched a channel for Spotify or Apple Music URLs and replied with every other platform went silent. Most of those bots were thin wrappers around Odesli. Same for a handful of open-source apps (Audile, Friendica, PasteSong) that treated api.song.link as infrastructure.

Coverage was already rotting before the cutoff. In April 2026 Audile's maintainer measured missing YouTube and Spotify links and got no reply from Odesli. In July I measured the same endpoint myself: successful JSON, but no Apple Music, no YouTube, no SoundCloud on well-known tracks. I wrote that up here. Eight days later the namespace closed.

What to use instead

If you just need a page for one track, paste the link at songport.link. No account. You get a universal URL that opens Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, Deezer, or SoundCloud. song.link still does this too, on their own pages.

If you were calling the API from software, you need a different endpoint. SongPort's is POST https://api.songport.link/v1/convert. It matches on ISRC first, labels YouTube as a title match when it has to, and does not ask for attribution. Keys are issued by hand while I watch real traffic. Waitlist and a live demo live on the developers page, and the field-by-field contract is in the API docs.

A Shortcut should not hold that key. Shortcuts are client-side, so the key would leak the first time someone shares the Shortcut. Call a small backend you control, or skip the Shortcut and paste into the website.

If you ran a song.link bot in a Discord server, do not point it at the consumer converter. /api/convert is 10 requests per IP per day, and a busy channel burns that before lunch. Call the paid API from a process you host, or a slash command that hits that API.

How to confirm it yourself

curl -sS -w "\nHTTP %{http_code}\n" \
  "https://api.song.link/v1-alpha.1/links?url=https%3A%2F%2Fopen.spotify.com%2Ftrack%2F4uLU6hMCjMI75M1A2tKUQC"

You should see PUBLIC_API_ACCESS_DEPRECATED and HTTP 401. Then open song.link in a browser. That page should still render. Those two facts together are the whole story.

For the July coverage table, the commercial terms, and a side-by-side with SongPort, the longer developer post is The Odesli API in 2026: Retired, and the Alternative I Built.