In just one year, Spotify had built a product that music bloggers were already excited about — and they helped spread the word about the exciting new music app. “Even today, Spotify’s traditional music player is better than everything I’ve tested on this side of Winamp / iTunes and a really good Direct Connect hub.” – Henrik Torstensson.
Everyone likes music. The tempo of life is getting faster and faster. Often there's no time to go through an entire list of music tracks and purchase the ones you like. Fortunately, audio streaming applications have changed the way we listen to music.
With modern technologies, we get effortless user experience and receive music in a matter of clicks. Mobile devices and a stellar speed Internet connection only compliment this trend.
It's a good mix of music you already know you like and a built-in discovery mechanism to stumble across new jams. If you're a Spotify Free user, Daily Mix playlists have unlimited skips on mobile. In that case, you can replace play.spotify.com with open.spotify.com in the URL, which will redirect to a simple playlist web page, then you can click the play button and it will open in the desktop app. Otherwise, it will still try to launch the playlist in the Spotify Web Player. Open TunesKit software and the Spotify will be launched simultaneously. Then drag and drop tracks from Spotify into the TunesKit interface. 2 Set Up Output Parameters. After adding music tracks from Spotify to TunesKit, you can choose the output audio format. There're six options including MP3, M4A, M4B, AAC, WAV and FLAC.
If you want to learn more about music streaming apps or create a music app, this article is right for you. Below, we share the music streaming market statistics, song streaming app monetization strategies, and how to make a music app like Spotify.
Read on!
5 Steps to create an app like Spotify
Step 1. Consider the main Spotify-like app features
A music streaming app includes such features as registration and signing up, music organizing, music discovery, social sharing, push notifications, and music library.
Step 2. Choose licensing type
As for Spotify, the platform has two types of licenses including Sound Recording License Agreement and Musical Composition License Agreement.
Step 3. Find music app developers
Choose a team that will build an app like Spotify for you. There are a lot of factors for you to consider. You also should check the portfolio of your music application development company.
Step 4. Develop an audio streaming app UI/UX design
Now, you and your development team should agree on how the future app will look. For that, you need to create an app Wireframe, Mockup, and Prototype.
Step 5. Create audio streaming app MVP
At this stage, you will decide on your MVP (minimum viable product), and all the other details with your development team and you are ready to go.
Why consider music streaming
If we're talking about music services - there are typical online radio stations and music streaming services, like Spotify. That's how people enjoy quality, easy-accessible sound spots.
What's more, people globally shift to their mobile devices to do pretty much anything. Phone calls only use a fraction of the time people spend on their cell phones.
But there is more!
- The global music streaming market is growing steadily — the global subscriber base is expected to reach 2.81 billion by the end of 2025.
[Image source: Goodwater]
- Music Streaming Application Market is expected to reach $17.50 Billion by 2025
- Statista said 14% of the population use paid music streaming services several times a day.
[Image source: RIAA]
- There are 186.7 million digital music users in the U.S.
- Spotify has over 200 million active users, more than 109 million paid subscribers, and about 40% of the global music streaming market
Did I mention that 72% of Spotify users are millennials, who, it seems, were born with mobiles in their hands?
Driven by advantageous technologies, the music streaming industry continues to grow. Therefore, the development of your live audio streaming app might be a great idea.
Current Leaders of the Sound Streaming Market
There are three leaders in the sound streaming market, including
- Spotify with 36% market share
- Apple Music with 19%
- Amazon Music counting 12% market share
Now, let us take a closer look at each of them.
[Image source: MIDA]
Spotify
Being a pioneer in the music-streaming market, Spotify is the best-known music app. The app has 109 million premium subscribers and 232 million monthly active users.
App users receive access to different music services. They include Discover Weekly playlists and experimental ones, like the Australia-only station.
Spotify has Facebook integration, which allows users to share with their Facebook friends. Besides, this feature enables Spotify users to share their music easier than competitors.
[Example of Spotify interface]
Apple Music
Apple Music is the second most popular music streaming app. It provides users with plenty of features and a discount for families and students. In June 2019, Apple Music had over 60 million paid subscribers, and 50 million songs in the library. Spotify helper memory mac. All Apple devices, including Apple HomePod, are compatible with this app. Still, unlike Spotify, the app does not have robust sharing options.
[Example of Apple Music interface]
Amazon Music Unlimited
Amazon Music is an advanced version of Amazon Prime Music, provided to Prime subscribers for free. For an extra payment, users receive access to an expanded catalog. Amazon Music recommends playlists grouped around artists the user already listened to. Also, the app shows the song lyrics on the 'now playing' screen.
[Example of Amazon Music interface]
To conclude, Spotify is not alone in this online music thing. Other significant players are Apple Music and Amazon Music.
All music streaming services have a lot of benefits, including:
- Quick access to music
- Affordability
- Unlimited storage
- Social engagement
As you can see, all these services appear to be outstanding because of these common features- they are effortless, intuitive, and easy to use.
The Killer Idea Behind Spotify
To give you a clear idea of how to start a music streaming service, let's discover the inner logic behind Spotify.
- Spotify stores music on various servers
- To stream a random track on your mobile, Spotify finds it on one of the millions of servers and sends it to your device
- Servers, in this case, are computers and all other gadgets of Spotify's subscribers
This concept is more effective than hitting servers with requests to download the track. At the same time, you become an essential link for the global social music sharing network, which is engaging too. And, it enables users to listen to all this music legally by paying royalties to authors.
Now, let's learn how to build a music streaming app and make it profitable.
How to Make Money with a Spotify-Like App
Music streaming services, like Spotify, have two main ways of earning; premium account and running ads. Let's check how Spotify applies these strategies.
[Image source: Statista]
Premium Services
The premium Spotify account provides users with free access to unlimited music across other devices. Besides, the app allows temporary downloading of songs for offline access and plays the highest quality music. There are several types of paid plans, including:
- Student plan cost $4.99 per month
- Regular account - $9.99 per month
- Family account - $14.99 a month
Ad-supported Services
App users with a free account can listen to a limited among of songs on demand, which may be interrupted by an advertisement. By using this business model, Spotify charges advertisers a cost-per-click and cost per mile fee.
According to their site, Spotify spends a significant chunk of money to pay royalty rewards to artists.
[Image source: Statista]
Read also: How Do Apps Make Money?
This concludes how to earn with your Spotify clone. You have to become a part of 'back to paid music' preachers, deal with authors and provide your users with a good deal of music value for their membership.
Critical Features to Include in a Spotify-Like App
If you are looking for ideas on how to make an app like Spotify, consider the following app features:
Registration / signing up
First, a user should be authorized to use your system. Users can register in Spotify via email or social media like Facebook.
Make sure you take this step very effortless for users. Connect it to social media and you get new subscribers in a matter of taps.
Music organizing
The app should provide features of grouping one's music, etc.
So, users can create playlists for different purposes, like current activities and genres.
Music Discovery
To motivate users to engage with your app more often, you need to provide them with personalized content. And here is where Spotify has a great competitive advantage over other services.
Spotify uses an AI-based recommendation algorithm that selects songs for the Discover Weekly section. Spotify developers created their own powerful discovery engine.
Let us check how it works.
For Weekly Discovery recommendation, Spotify uses three types of recommendation models, including:
- User crossovers with the listening history of other users
- Natural language processing. In Spotify, this technology works on the Echo Nest API. It learns about the music genres by analyzing the text and looking at similar terms associated with the artist across the Internet. Kafka manages the data in real-time.
- Deep learning to analyzes the raw tracks. For this, Spotify applies' convolution neural network.' This deep neural network learns from experience using only raw data input.
All things social
This feature allows users to share songs with friends and highlight favorite tracks on a social feed. It's also going to serve your app with a good deal of word-of-mouth advertising at the same time.
Read also: How To Develop a Social Media App?
Push notifications
Push notification is a deciding feature for such a social community based on follow-ups and spreading content. People want news from their favorite sources; that's how it works now - users wish to have valuable personalized benefits from your service.
Music Library
Unfortunately, this feature is absent in Spotify. Because of this, users can not host or upload their tracks and create a music library. The only option is to create personal playlists and subscribe to music channels created by other users.
At the same time, this feature is available in Apple Music. It allows users to add and synchronize songs on their devices and in-app playlists. Users can store a certain amount of songs on their app for free or upgrade to a premium plan.
To give you a clue of how to make a music app, and even better app than Spotify, consider this function as well.
Now, let's find out, how to build a music app.
Where to Start: Your Guide to Making a Music App like Spotify
Now, let's dig deeper into the process of music streaming app development. Below, we share a step-by-step guide on how to make a music streaming app, together with cost estimations.
Check this out.
Ideas are everything
For music app development, you need to specify the whole concept of the app. In order to do this, find a similar application, and of course, think of something that makes your app special.
Licensing
When developing a music streaming service, you need to get a license to provide your subscribers with legal audio content.
As for Spotify, the platform has two types of licenses for music distribution, such as:
- Sound Recording License Agreement, covering recording rights. Spotify uses licenses received from the big three record labels - Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment Group, and Warner Music Group.
- Musical Composition License Agreement. This covers the rightful owners of the songs, managed through two main firms in the U.S.-BMI and ASCAP.
When looking for an answer on how to make your own music app, do not forget to get such a license.
Find music app developers
Now it's time to come to the actual work and choose a team that will build an app like Spotify for you. There are a lot of factors for you to consider. To estimate how much it costs to develop a music app like Spotify, check developer rates among regions:
- USA/Canada-based dev teams - $50 to $250/hour
- Western Europe - $30 to$170/hour
- Eastern Europe - $25 to $150/hour
- Australia - $50 to $150/hour
- India - $10 to $80/hour
You also should check the portfolio of your music application development company. From the beginning, communicate with your team to make sure you're on the same track. At the APP Solutions, we usually hold meetings with our clients on a regular basis via Skype.
See also: How to Outsource App Development?
Plan & Estimate
This market has significant potential, but that's not enough to run and spend all you have for a killer application. You need to run a study and learn about your target audiences' preferences. Then, communicate your business idea to your development team. The team will come up with some technological solutions, cost estimation, and project requirements.
Develop an audio streaming app
UI/UX design
Now, you and your development team should agree on how the future app will look. Here, you can offer the design team some ideas, if you have them.
The necessary process of the music app design creating includes the following stages.
- Wireframe. The team will create a black and white app that shows the general concept of the app.
- Mockup. The team develops colorful but static screens of the future app. Mockups include icon design, button shapes, spaces, etc.
- Prototype. The team creates an interactive model of the app that shows how the app acts. As a rule, prototypes give you an option to tap, swap, drag, and see the result.
Choose tech stack
To develop your Spotify-like app, consider Spotify developer tools, like Python and JavaScript. Besides, Spotify uses PHP for the server-side and Java for back-end structure. As we said, Spotify stores all the music files on the device cache. For this, use Cassandra, PostgreSQL, as well as a general memory caching system.
When looking for a clue on how to create a music streaming service, take into account that Spotify uses the following technologies:
What Is Spotify App
- Kafka software for real-time data management and processing
- GraphWalker for model-based tests and Python integration
- Amazon S3 for cloud-based music streaming
- Dataproc for platform infrastructure
- Chromium embedded framework for building UI for desktop application
- Bootstrap for web app development
- Nginx as open-source HTTP and proxy server
- C++ for Windows/Mac clients
- Java for Android music streaming app
- Objective-C for iOS music streaming app
How to make a music streaming website?
You can empower your app with Spotify players by integrating Spotify player SDK. This library contains classes to stream management and audio playback. It takes on all the negotiation with Spotify's back-end, digital rights management, and decoding.
Spotify free mobile streaming. Download music from spotify 2017. [Spotnews screens]
We did such integration for our recent project, SpotNews. SpotNews is an audio streaming platform that provides personalized music content. The idea behind the app is to allow users to listen to their favorite songs while reading the news sections.
How Spotify App Is Built Windows
We also used:
- Spotify SDK for authorization via the Spotify user profile
- Java Android SDK, Retrofit, Fresco, Crashlytics, and Realm to provide smooth app performance
- PHP, Silex, MySQL, Composer HTML5, CSS3, Twitter BootStrap, Jquery, Bower, Less, Nginx to moderate the news feeds via the Admin Panel
You might also like: HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO DEVELOP A CHAT APP LIKE SNAPCHAT IN 2019
Create audio streaming app MVP
At this stage, you will decide on your MVP (minimum viable product), and all the other details with your development team and you are ready to go.
When looking for ideas on how to create a music app, consider the following features for your music streaming app MVP:
Feature | Integrations | Estimation in hours |
Registration / signing up |
| From 32 hours |
Profile user |
| From 36 hours |
Social Share | From 15 hours | |
Personalization | Pick-up algorithm that will choose the next music track for each individual user. Use ML to find appropriate songs for users | From 100 hours |
Music player |
| 70 |
Track search |
| From 32 hours |
https://yellowaaa533.weebly.com/blog/spotify-lite-premium-mod-apk. Playlist manager |
| From 60 hours |
Total | From 345 hours |
The average development cost of a music streaming app like Spotify is about $40-50K per platform.
For a more detailed estimation, you can use our project cost calculator. Now you know how to create a music app like Spotify.
You might also like: HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO MAKE AN APP?
Take it to the test
After the application is ready, the team does in-depth testing to ensure the app runs smoothly. We usually implement it right after the app is prepared and approved. Plus, three months after release our developers can fix any issues occurred for free.
Wrapping up
The music streaming app market is growing, and its revenue is expected to reach $17.50 Billion by 2025.
Spotify is the leader among music streaming apps. It uses a raft of modern technologies to provide users with relevant music content.
While music streaming is a hot trend, you have a chance to get your share of the music streaming market, as Spotify did.
But, to achieve success with your app, and be ahead of competitors, you need to get started asap.
The last thing that remains is to find a development team. And we are here to help.
As we prepare to launch 2020 Wrapped, we remind ourselves of the challenges we took on and lessons learned to make this year’s experience even better for audio fans, like you, around the world.
The 2019 Wrapped campaign was a first on many fronts. It was the first Wrapped experience to exist in-app, give our listeners a look back on the past 10 years of music and culture, and the first to shine a light on how our artists and podcasters connected with their listeners over the past 10 years.
Along with processing a decade’s worth of data for over 240 million active users (you can read more from our data team here), we wanted to take on the challenge of transitioning the Wrapped experience from web-only to in-app. To accomplish this, multiple sub-teams were responsible for a range of functions, including marketing, legal, design, data, and frontend and backend engineering. This undertaking was a company-wide effort and one that was met with both successes and learning experiences.
Setting the stage
We have a number of learnings that we can carry forward like what worked well and what could have been improved — we wanted to share some of those highlights.
The product team is modeled like a startup, which proved beneficial during development; lean, resilient, innovative, risk-taking, and using mistakes as learning opportunities. The goal was to create an engaging, shareable experience for users, and the developer team needed to strike a balance between the product team’s aspirations, minimizing risks, and managing dependencies for execution. It required creativity and flexibility in problem-solving.
Empower the team through clear goals and step aside
The team, composed of different disciplines including Insights, Design, Product and Tech, gathered to define their respective priorities and KPIs. This was very useful for onboarding engineers on to the project, motivating and empowering them to make decisions, and prioritizing, first and foremost, the work. A question like, “Should I fix a bug for sharing or for the stories experience?” was easily answered without bottlenecks.
To give users the best native experience possible, the experience needed to be:
- Simple and intuitive
- Easy to share
- A part of the Spotify experience in look, feel, and function
To determine if these qualifications were met, clear and quantifiable objectives were essential to empowering the engineering team.
A Lean approach
With input from the project stakeholders, a reverse timeline of essential events with key dates and milestones was established, including the go-live date, when the code should be frozen, the date when the Release Candidate would be submitted to the Apple/Google Store, the point at which real data from users/employees would be received, and when to start coding.
To simplify communication and organization, milestones were set for Fridays. It eased decisions around dates, and brought consistency and accountability to set commitments.
To develop a product by the release date, we followed a lean approach to manage the development process. We took an incremental approach to product development and broke down the product vision into the bare bones of an MVP (minimum viable product) — Version 0.1; a stories container with audio and static stories…no animations whatsoever. From there, we began adding features based on the team’s goals for future versions, and delivered version 0.2 to market.
How we built it
The team began as a small group of iOS, Android, and backend engineers working to create a native experience on iOS and Android. It was soon realized that the cost and effort needed to develop the personalized, shareable card for each story and user was underestimated — the decision to either re-scope the functionality or find another solution had to be made quickly.
The initial system design looked liked this:
The engineering team drafted a proposal and built a proof of concept of a backend service that could render those images, in real time, incorporating CEF (a C++ library), using HTML templates and CSS 3.1. The solution was clear, and the question soon became, “how do we staff a team with back-end and web engineers to be flexible with rigid time constraints?”
It’s never too early to get started
We were building a product for the largest marketing initiative of the year. Though we began work earlier than previous years, there were still challenges that made this an intense ride.
For a global marketing campaign, localization is an essential consideration. For example, in Japanese, line breaks can change the meaning of a sentence and break a message. And for the first time, right-to-left languages were supported. It wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking, but with the addition of animations like the genre bars or a spinning globe…?.
Numerous corner cases were found along the way simply due to the sheer magnitude of data processed, like what do we do if a user has only listened to podcasts? Or what if they only listened to a handful of podcasts? What if a user only listened to a single genre, or listened to music from one country? These were just a few of the cases we came across. There were many, many more.
The team needed to be resilient and so did our systems. We handled translations from the backend to have certain flexibility to deal with last minute translation issues. Like 1 hour before going live when a Japanese string was causing the iOS experience to crash for certain users.
The Results
The final system ended up looking like this:
Three days before going live, while doing load testing we realized we needed to scale up traffic estimations. We fine-tuned the GKE configuration, added an additional caching layer for the payload of our downstream dependencies, and removed a race condition in the Image Generator component. And as an additional precaution, we ran a data job to pre-generate some images for the initial peak of traffic — a 42-hour job generating around 535 million images completed 2 hours before going live.
We were happy to say that the 2019 Wrapped campaign was well received and building the native experience was worth the effort and stress to excite/delight audio fans all around the globe.
The fellowship of Wrapped
We’d like to thank the Edison Tribe under the Growth Opportunities Mission, Marketing, Brand + Creative, and all those who contributed to making this project successful. We couldn’t have done it without you. 2020 Wrapped is coming soon, so stay tuned and keep listening!