---
title: "Radio and broadcast monitoring APIs compared (2026): AudD, ACRCloud, BMAT"
description: "How AudD, ACRCloud, and BMAT handle 24/7 radio and TV airplay monitoring for royalty reporting and charts: how stations are added, what each result contains, how you are alerted to broken streams, and what it costs per station."
slug: "/resources/articles/best-broadcast-monitoring-apis"
section: "articles"
keywords: [audd, broadcast monitoring api, radio airplay monitoring, royalty reporting, acrcloud broadcast monitoring, bmat, music recognition api, stream monitoring]
---

# 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](https://dashboard.audd.io), set
a callback URL, and add your first stream. Full reference:
[streams documentation](https://docs.audd.io/streams).
For a free test on your own stations, write to
[api@audd.io](mailto:api@audd.io).

---

**Related**

- [How to monitor music airplay across radio stations using an API](/resources/articles/monitor-radio-airplay-with-an-api)
- [What is broadcast music monitoring?](/resources/articles/what-is-broadcast-music-monitoring)
- [How to use callbacks with the AudD API](/resources/articles/audd-api-webhooks-real-time-music-alerts)
- [Best music recognition APIs in 2026](/resources/articles/best-music-recognition-apis)