How to Make a Music Streaming App: Business Model, Features, and Cost

Mobile apps have changed the way we listen to music. There are various music streaming services on the App Store and Google Play.

The market leaders like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Prime Music have become that popular because they’re simply convenient and offer good value for money. However, if you want to create a music streaming app, you need to consider various factors like license, platform, and others.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to make a music streaming app, required features, and their cost.

Music streaming applications gain their popularity due to convenience they bring to users. Let’s consider some interesting statistics.

• The global music streaming market is expected to exceed $10 billion by 2023.
• The average revenue per user is approximately $26.
• Spotify has 36% market share of music streaming subscribers.
• Apple claims that 60 million users pay for Apple Music subscription.

As you can see, the music streaming market is quite prospective. However, it can be challenging to compete with services like Spotify or Amazon Prime Music. Such platforms have spent over five years to acquire a user base and become who they’re now. They invest a lot of money in machine learning and artificial intelligence to make music streaming apps capable of suggesting relevant artists, tracks, and albums.

Before considering how to create your own music streaming service, let’s first discuss several market leaders to understand what stands behind their success.

There are a bunch of cool music streaming applications that offer exciting features. For your music streaming app to be successful, it's important to know how users value them. So, the question arises — how to create an audio streaming app? Let’s dive into this topic below.

There are various things to consider before starting music streaming app development. We’ve singled out four significant points that you need to consider beforehand.

How to create your own music streaming service? First off, you have to find specialists that will work on such a complex project implementation. How to do that? Here you’ve got two options: gather in-house team or apply to an outsourcing vendor for collaboration.

Both the variants are good; however, you should understand some peculiarities of their choice. You can choose in-house team gathering — in this case you should have quite a large budget to rent office, pay sick leaves for your staff members, and so on. Moreover, you’ll need a lot of time to find developers, conduct job interviews and hire the experts; after hiring you will have to also control your project flows and do many other activities.

Selecting an outsourcing vendor to collaborate means finding a software development company with an in-depth expertise in creating music streaming apps. After studying vendor’s portfolio, collecting previous clients’ feedback and doing many other activities that’ll finish with signing a contract, the provider will offer you qualified specialists to build your own music streaming service. These specialists’ job will be monitored by the provider themselves — your job will be to approve the completed parts of work or offer your variants to correct.

It should also be mentioned that an outsourcing option has an advantageous price quality ratio: for example, Cleveroad outsourcing team can create and deliver your project in align with your budget, timeline and expectations.

Let’s discover what kind of app you want to create. It’s common to consider three types:

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to create a music streaming app with a server-based library.

Music streaming services allow users to listen to music without purchasing. However, as the owner, you need to get a license for using music content.

So, if you want to create music streaming website or app, you need the Public Performance Rights.

In the United States, it can be handled by one of two agencies:

• The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
• Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI)

To stream music in Europe, apply to the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC).

Let's consider an example.

Spotify gets two types of licensing for streaming music:

• Sound Recording License agreements to cover the rights to a particular record.
• Musical Composition License Agreements to cover the people who own the rights to the song.

Spotify signs contracts with large music labels like Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment Group, and others to stream music with copyrights belonging to these companies.

We DON’T recommend skipping licensing and streaming music without permission. If no license, you’ll have to pay a fine from a minimum of $750 up to $150,000 per one song played.

While building a music streaming app, your development team should take care of data storage. You need a back-end server that supports streaming. For example, you can consider using such services as AWS.

Another option is to stream from Spotify or SoundCloud catalogs using SDK and API provided by them. However, while deciding on how to create a music streaming service, you should keep in mind the restrictions listed in Terms of Use for developer tools.

If you wish, you can do without third-party streaming APIs and create a data storage based app on a self-hosted server. In this case, you upload your songs into a readable directory on your server. The Cleveroad professionals can consult you and provide recommendations based on their experience to help you to make a choice.

These days, there are two popular platforms — iOS and Android. So which platform to choose to create your own music streaming service? The answer is simple — you need to develop applications for both of them to stay competitive. For example, Apple Inc. created an Apple Music app for Android devices to gain more users.

However, if you’re on a budget budget, it’s possible to choose one platform according to your target audience and their preferences. For example, in the USA, people prefer iOS devices. Meanwhile, in Europian market Android prescence is more significant.

When you decide to build your own music streaming app, it makes sense to start by creating Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It's a software functionality with basic features to ensure the app's functioning and attract initial users. This way, you will be able to test your software concept viability without significant expenditures.

What are other benefits the MVP building can bring into your project? We’ll list some of them below:

• Verifying and proving market demand for your upcoming streaming service
• You can clearly see whether the audio streaming app is attractive for customers
• The changes in your service for streaming can be made cost-effectively, etc.

How to make your own music streaming service? You need to discover the demanded features according to the users’ needs.

It’s common to divide features into two categories — MVP and advanced. MVP or must-have features stand for essential functionality to satisfy basic use needs. You can create an MVP of your music streaming app, release it, and get the feedback. After that, you can add more advanced and expensive features.

Additionally, having an MVP version of your app, you have more chances to get investments. A working product makes stakeholders trust you. Our specialists cab provide you with comprehensive market research and help you to determine which features to implement into the MVP version.

Let’s single out must-have features for a music streaming app.

• Music player. How to create a music streaming app and reach success? You have to develop a user-friendly music player. Users can create playlists of favorite songs, add albums, and mark artists as favorite.
• Registration. You need to offer several options to make the process fast and user-friendly. For instance, you can integrate signup via social networks like Facebook or Google. Also, you need to add email and password, phone number and password signups. ‘Forget password’ feature makes your app more user-friendly.
• Search. To find music, users need to have a search. Users can search for the music by artist, title, album, recording studio, or genre.
• My music. The users can look through their favorite tracks and download them. Also, they can create or delete playlists, share playlists, and play them. You can also add the ability to share playlists or songs via social media. It’s common to integrate an artist screen with popular tracks and latest albums.
• Settings. To make a music streaming app more user-friendly, you need to incorporate the ability to change audio and app settings. For example, you can add an automatic download, sync for various devices.

Except for features, two factors can affect the price significantly — an admin panel and an attractive UI/UX design.

Admin Panel It allows managing subscriptions, creating featured playlists, and (delete and add them). You need one admin panel for all apps. To develop an admin panel, web developers require at least 431 hours.

Design To reach success, you need to pay attention to the UI/UX design. Your music streaming app design should be intuitive and user-friendly. Designers need at least 150 hours to create a design for one platform (iOS or Android)

How to make a music streaming app outstanding? You need to integrate several advanced features. Here are some ideas:

• Recommendation
• Preferences
• Personalized notifications
• Social sharing
• Top trending artists/songs
• Global search

How to create your own music streaming service?

To create iOS and Android music streaming applications, you need to cooperate with various specialists. To give you a hint, we’ve listed the required team members below.

• Business Analyst
• Project Manager
• UI/UX designer
• 1 or 2 Android developers
• 1 or 2 iOS developers
• Back-end developers
• QA engineer

Music streaming apps require a scalable tech stack. For example, you need to use various programming languages for developing iOS and Android apps, Swift and Kotlin respectively. Also, you need a scalable database.

To help you, let’s consider Spotify tech stack:

• Programming languages: Python, Java
• Frameworks: Hadoop, Apache Storm, Hub Framework
• Server: Nginx
• Cloud storage: Amazon S3, Google BigQuery
• CDN: Amazon CloudFront
• Database: PostgreSQL, Cassandra
• Tools: Bootstrap, Kafka, Google Analytics
• DevOps: Docker, Datadog, TestFlight

Considering all the factors we’ve discussed, let’s find out the final time and music streaming app development cost.

All the estimations below are based on the average rate in Central Europe — $50 per hour.

As you can see, the cost to create your own music streaming service (MVP version) may range between $88,250 and $150,850 for one or two platforms respectively.

However, the final price can vary depending on the location of your development team. For example, developers from North America tend to have higher hourly rates in comparison to engineers from Central Europe.

What is the final price for various regions? We’ve counted the cost to create an audio streaming app (MVP version for iOS and Android) for different regions.

• Central Europe. $150,850 (based on $50/h)
• North America. $301,700 (based on $100/h)
• Western Europe. $271,530 (based on $90/h)
• Australia. $301,700 (based on $100/h)

How to make a music streaming service profitable?

Of course, you need to offer popular content to gain more users when you create audio streaming app. Also, you need to consider several monetization strategies to get profit. Here are some widespread ways:

• Freemium
• Subscription
• Advertisements

Let’s single out the details of each option.

Spotify’s business model is quite simple. However, it brings a stable revenue to the company.

Spotify makes money using two monetization models — advertisements and subscription.

To understand how Spotify works, we’ve made a business model canvas of this service. It consists of value propositions, business partners, revenues, and more.

We’ve been making software solutions for the Streaming industry for over five years. Our team of developers is experienced in developing scalable iOS and Android apps of different complexity levels.

We’ve recently helped to update one of streaming projects — Blockbuster.

Blockbuster is a video streaming service for Nordic countries. It has a web version, iOS and Android apps along with support for Android TV and Apple TV.

Our team has developed several exciting features you can explore in Case Study: Blockbuster Streaming app.

To create this featured solution, we’ve used the following tech stack and tools:

For web architecture:

• Node.js
• CloudFront
• Lambada
• Appollo
• GrapgQL
• Elastic Beanstalk
• Facebook
• Youbira
• Google Cast SDK
• AWS AppSync

For mobile app: