What is the best API for radio airplay monitoring?

It depends on whether you know which stations to monitor. To monitor specific radio or TV stations or live streams, use AudD: it recognizes any stream URL you give it, 24/7, against 160 million songs or your own catalog, for $45 per stream per month, or $25 against your own catalog. To cover a region without having station URLs, use ACRCloud, which offers a pre-indexed database of 50,000+ radio and TV stations. BMAT is a rights-data platform for collecting societies and publishers rather than a self-serve monitoring API.

How much does it cost to monitor 300 radio stations?

With AudD, 300 streams cost $13,500 per month against AudD's 160-million-song database, or $7,500 per month against your own uploaded catalog. ACRCloud and BMAT quote prices on request.

Do I need to run my own servers to monitor radio stations with AudD?

No. AudD connects to each stream, recognizes it around the clock, and sends the results to you by callback or long polling. AudD also alerts you when a stream can't be reached or carries only noise. Customers who don't want to use the API can ask for reports as spreadsheets or for a chat bot instead.

Does AudD return ISRC codes for broadcast monitoring?

Yes, on request: contact api@audd.io to receive ISRC, UPC, and streaming-service metadata in stream results. Each result also includes the play time and play length of the song.

Radio and broadcast monitoring APIs compared (2026): AudD, ACRCloud, BMAT

A radio monitoring service listens to stations around the clock and reports every song it hears: which station, when it started, and how long it played. Royalty reports, airplay charts, and label promotion tracking are all built on that log.

The first question is whether you know which stations you want. If you do, and have their stream URLs, AudD monitors exactly those. If you want a whole region covered and don’t have the URLs, ACRCloud’s pre-indexed station list is the shorter path.

What a monitoring service has to do

Connect to every station and stay connected. Streams change URLs, go silent, and drop. The service should reconnect, and tell you when it can’t.
Recognize music under speech. Radio has presenters, jingles, and ads over and between songs.
Report start time and play length. Some royalty schemes pay by how long a song played.
Return identifiers. ISRC codes let royalty systems match a play to the right recording and rights holders.
Cover local repertoire. Regional releases, station jingles, and ads are missing from commercial catalogs, so the service needs a way to add your own audio.

AudD

AudD’s stream monitoring watches the specific radio stations, TV channels, and live streams you choose. It takes any stream URL: Icecast, HLS, DASH, and m3u playlists, plus Twitch channels and YouTube live streams. You register each station once with addStream and give it your own numeric ID. AudD connects to it and recognizes it 24/7 against its database of 160 million songs, or against your own uploaded catalog.

Results arrive by callback to your server or by HTTP long polling. By default, a result is sent when a song finishes and includes the song’s start time and total play length. With callbacks=before, results are sent as soon as a song starts. If your server is down, callbacks are queued and delivered when it comes back.

AudD also reports stream health. A notification with code 650 means AudD can’t connect to the stream, and 651 means the stream carries no music, only noise.

Each result carries artist, title, album, label, release date, and a listening link. ISRC, UPC, and streaming-service metadata are available on request. Matches against your own catalog return the ID you assigned when you uploaded the track.

Pricing: $45 per stream per month against AudD’s database, or $25 per stream per month against your own catalog. Three hundred stations cost $13,500 per month, or $7,500 against your own catalog. On-premise deployment is available for large installations. Teams that don’t want to write code can ask for reports as spreadsheets or for a bot that posts the current song to a chat.

Who uses it: radio-monitoring company TopHit.

What AudD doesn’t offer: a pre-built list of stations to pick from. You add the streams you want, and results start when you add them.

ACRCloud

ACRCloud’s broadcast monitoring product is built around a database of more than 50,000 radio and TV stations it already indexes. You pick stations from that list or add custom stream URLs. Its API returns results in real time, lets you download historical results, and manages your station list.

Its site also lists:

recordings of the monitored audio, shown next to recognition results;
an “Unidentified Content Filter” that collects repeated audio nobody has identified yet, so you can label it and have it matched from then on;
advert monitoring against your own uploaded ads.

ACRCloud offers a 14-day free trial. Prices are on request; TrackRadar’s comparison lists ACRCloud broadcast monitoring from $299 per month.

BMAT

BMAT describes itself as an operating system for music copyright. Its focus is the rights chain after detection: ingesting and matching usage data, linking recordings to compositions (it reports 260 million ISRC–ISWC links), and processing royalties ($3 billion a year, by its own figures). Its customers are collecting societies, publishers, and broadcasters. BMAT is sold as an enterprise service, with prices on request.

Which service fits which setup

You need	Consider
Specific radio or TV stations or live streams, by URL, billed per station	AudD
Your own catalog, jingles, or ads recognized on air	AudD ($25 per stream) or ACRCloud
Coverage of a region without stream URLs, from a pre-indexed station list	ACRCloud
Royalty processing and society reporting handled end to end	BMAT
Audio that never leaves your infrastructure	AudD on-premise

You can also split the work: run detection with AudD or ACRCloud and feed the results into your own or a partner’s royalty system.

Setting up AudD stream monitoring

Set a stream limit and pay on the dashboard, set a callback URL, and add your first stream. Full reference: streams documentation. For a free test on your own stations, write to [email protected].

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