Amazon Product Advertising API: JSON results without AWS?

I registered for the Amazon affiliate program a few years ago and never used it.

Now I want to give it a try: I want to search music titles in order to create affiliate links. This would be done via jQuery, so I'd like to grab JSON results.

Problem 1: I only see XLM results in the docs. This thread doesn't give much hope either: Amazon Product Advertising API : How to get a JSON response for ItemLookup/Search

Problem 2: In order to get an API ID I ended up signing an AWS account and aborted when they told me "the first year is free" and asked for credit card details. The shit was created nontheless and I requested account deletition via the "support". Is an AWS account really needed?

Can somebody clearify?