It's nearly impossible to make a music app without the help of a few music API's. Whether you intend to create a Shazam clone, a Soundcloud clone, a Kobalt clone, some sort of studio-in-a-box app, music quiz, DJ app, instrument app, radio app, social network mashup, etc. these API's can help you make something great.

Music apps come and go but the API's below are standing strong. I suggest reviewing these sources before wasting to much time on Programmable Web.

If there are any API's you think are worth sharing, please submit a comment below.

Metadata

Metadata can mean a lot of things including information on artist or track data as well as album data. Metadata can also mean music tags (for recommendation engines) or the copyright on album artwork.

• Music Brainz - Probably the most important opensource music metadata project to date. If you're looking for album art or data about artists, catalog, record label, etc. this is the place.
• Last.fm -The grandfather of music API's. This service is great for non-commercial use.
• Rovi is the grandfather of Metadata.
• Gracenote iTunes
• Gracenote Music Discovery
• Spotify iOS SDK
• Spotify Libspotify SDK - This is for non-commercial uses of Spotify
• EchoNest
• Jamendo
• Gracenote
• Guvr
• Hypemachine API - Use the API to access to data like blogs, tracks, artists, a list of user favorites, or featured content.

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Live Concerts

• Song Kick
• Bands in town
• Ticketmaster

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Royalties

• Sound Exchange Search for figuring out royalties payments

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Music Identification (tagging)

• Echonest API - Is designed to help you analyze tracks and add metadata to content.
• Echoprint Music identification - This is great for music tagging.
• ISRC Global Sound Recording Database - Every new audio recording now has a unique fingerprint that makes it easy to catalog called International Standard Recording Code (ISRC).
• Music Brainz Picard
• AcousticID - These guys offer two functions, searching in the fingerprint database and submitting new fingerprints into the database.
• Gracenote Music Recognition

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Album Art

Album artwork is tricky because as a developer, you will not own the license to the artwork. Before diving into these next API's, I suggest you read these Quora responses to get your feet wet. Remember, if you don't already own the copyright or have a license, save yourself time, money and headache through a little bit of research.

• Music Brainz
• Rovi
• Cover Art - Cover Art Archive is a joint project between the Internet Archive and MusicBrainz, whose goal is to make cover art images available to everyone on the Internet in an organised and convenient way.
• Free Covers
• Apple iTunes
• Fancy Audio is a ruby gem that can help you insert your own custom album artwork to an mp3.

I'd also look at Quora and this other Q&A site to find new updates.

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Affiliate Marketing

• iTunes Search API through an Adam ID - iTunes uses an Adam ID to search for songs. This is how you can query for the Adam ID.

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Playlists

• Spotify Web API

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Maps

Almost all music is heard on the radio and oftentimes, we're driving around like this:

Since the music industry is synonymous with radio and the radio industry is synonymous with cars, then us music people would do good by keeping a close eye on how technology is changing cars. So far, the biggest changes will likely happen in telematics which includes maps, geo, and GIS.

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Radio Platforms

• Spotify SDK - Stream your Spotify music on a browser, Android phone, iOS device or desktop computer.
• Soundcloud SDK is responsible for great apps such as Hype Machine and Noon Pacific and Radium and Vox
• iHeartRadio

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Other Great Lists

• Music Machinery list of music API's.
• Wikipedia