conorbronsdon/apple-podcasts-mcp

Owner-side Apple Podcasts analytics for AI agents: plays, followers, and per-episode listening, over the Apple Podcasts Connect Reporter protocol. Read-only.
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An MCP server for the analytics Apple shows the person who owns the show: how many plays an episode got, how far into it people got, and whether the follower count is moving. That data lives behind Apple Podcasts Connect and the Reporter service, and it is not in Apple's public catalog API.
**Nothing here has been checked against a live Apple account.** The protocol is implemented from Apple's Reporter documentation and tested against fixtures written by hand. No request this server sends and no response it parses has been confirmed on the wire. If you run it against a real vendor number, an issue saying what came back is the most useful thing you can send.
**You need an Apple Podcasters Program membership to use this at all.** Reporter identifies you by a *vendor number*, and a vendor number is issued as part of the vendor relationship that Program enrollment creates. A standard free Podcasts Connect account does not have one: its Account → Details page shows an account UUID, which is a different identifier and will not work here. Enrollment costs an annual fee and requires a legal entity with tax and banking details. See Availability of Apple Podcasts features.
If you are not enrolled, there is nothing to configure and this server cannot help you — read your numbers in the Analytics section of Podcasts Connect instead.
**Read-only.** Reporter only reads. Nothing this server does can change a show, an episode, or an account.
What this does not do
This is not the iTunes Search / public catalog API. It does not look up shows by name, read public charts, fetch artwork, or return reviews and ratings. The other "Apple Podcasts" MCP servers I have looked at wrap the public catalog, which needs no credentials. This one needs your vendor number and your access token, and in exchange it returns your own listening data.
It also does not cover:
- **Subscriptions and revenue.** Reporter has apSubscriptionsSales and friends. This server does not wrap them.
- **Anything before you had a Podcasts Connect account.** Reporter reports on what Apple recorded for your vendor number.
- **Today.** Apple publishes on a one-to-two day lag, so ranges default to ending two days back.
- **Downloads.** Apple reports plays and listeners, which are not downloads. If you want download counts, use a hosting or prefix analytics source such as op3-mcp.
Tools
| Tool | What it returns |
|------|-----------------|
| apple_podcasts_check_access | Whether the token works, which vendor numbers it can read, and the token expiry when Apple returns one. No listening data. |
| apple_podcasts_summary | Show-level plays, unique listeners, engaged listeners, and followers over a date range, per period and totalled. Listener counts are devices, not people — see What the metrics mean. |
| apple_podcasts_episodes | Per-episode plays and listener counts over a date range, rolled up across periods and ranked. |
| apple_podcasts_followers | Follower value per period across a range, with the change over the window. |
There is deliberately no "fetch the raw report" tool. Reporter returns one report per date, each with a row per episode and, in the non-worldwide variants, a row per storefront per episode. A month of that is tens of thousands of rows, and handing it to an agent verbatim is how you spend a context window on tab-separated text.
Every tool takes an explicit date range and a cap:
- max_periods limits how many Reporter calls a single tool call makes. Hard cap 31. Reporter has no range query — one date is one HTTP round trip — so this is a rate-limit guard, not a formality. A range wider than the cap is truncated to the **most recent** periods, and the response says so with rangeTruncated.
- limit on apple_podcasts_episodes caps returned rows at 50.
- Ranges default short: 7 days for Daily, 7 weeks for Weekly, 6 months for Monthly. Each default is sized to fit inside the default max_periods of 7, so a call with no dates returns a whole window rather than a truncated one.