How to Make a Music App: Features, Tech, and Cost

Technology has brought about a colossal change in every industry in the past few years, including how we listen to music. As we’ve shifted to mobile apps to do pretty much everything, music streaming apps have become more popular than ever.

Phase 1: Discovery and business analysis

You have a brilliant app idea, but where do you start? Before getting on with the development of a music app, you need to prepare a planned concept for the project. It involves understanding the music app market, researching the target audience, and defining the type of future app you will develop. Analyzing the target audience will also help decide the target platforms or devices you want to run your app on.

Choose the type of music app

Choosing the type of music app you want to create is the first step in refining your app idea. Music streaming apps exist in various formats and offer different listening options. However, the most popular music services fall into three common categories:

• Music libraries
• Cloud Storage
• Radio Stations

Licensing requirements for a music streaming app

• Public Performance Rights
• Sound Recording license

Phase 2: Plan out the app features

The research and analysis done above help you list out the app’s key features and advanced functionalities tailored to match the needs of your target audience. It will also help you draw out a rough budget, marketing, and monetization strategies for your app.

Basic features

Here’s the list of must-have features for a music streaming app:

• Login & Registration
• User Profile
• Search
• Music Player
• User’s Library
• Artist & Album Profiles

Advanced features

Here are some advanced features you can add to make your music streaming app more outstanding:

• AI-based Personalized Recommendation
• Discover Music
• Offline Mode
• Push Notifications
• Social Sharing
• Payments Integration

Phase 3: Design and development

Now that you know what you want your app to do it is time to design and develop your music streaming app. It makes up for 60% of the overall app development process.

UI/UX design stage

Your app’s UI/UX design is one of the critical factors responsible for its success. A user-friendly but appealing, intuitive, and modern design will help attract and retain your users. Thus, hiring highly skilled UI/UX designers from a software development company is of utmost importance.

• Wireframing, where the designers create a black and white app sketch to show the general design concept of the app.
• Mock-ups are developed to show the app’s static but colorful screens and include icons, buttons, etc.
• Prototyping is where the team develops an interactive app model to show how the app acts where you can tap, swipe, drag, etc., to see the results.

How to develop a music app: Tech stack required

Firstly, the tech stack will depend on the platforms/devices you’re targeting — commonly Android, iOS, and a web version. If you’re on a tight budget, you can build an app for one platform based on the target audience and later target another platform. Or you can use technologies like Flutter or React Native to build a cross-platform app with a single codebase that runs on multiple platforms.

How does music streaming app work?

Most popular streaming apps like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Youtube Music store their music on millions of servers. So when a user wants to listen to a track, the mobile app “asks” the backend to fetch the data. And the backend does all the heavy lifting of finding the tracks from the servers and sending them back to the device. The server logic also performs all other tasks such as working with the databases, user authentication, searching, suggesting artists/albums, and updating the library.

Below is the most basic architecture of music streaming application:

However, building a solid architecture with your technical team will provide a clear roadmap for developers before commencing the development and save time.

• Reliable Storage Architecture
• Cloud-based Streaming

Phase 4: Testing and QA

The development phase of your app does not end without in-depth testing and quality assurance. Therefore, it is fundamental to ensure that your streaming app runs smoothly and as expected before the launch.

How Much Does it Cost to Make a Music App?

There is no clear-cut figure of how much a music app costs to develop. Instead, it is determined by various factors, including the app’s features, complexity, the number of target platforms or devices, the technology stack, the size/structure of your development team, and even their geographical location. Let’s assess the essential factors that affect the music app development cost.

Target platforms and devices

Choosing the kind of app you want to create- whether a native iOS app, native Android, hybrid app, or web app- is an essential step in the app development process. It is best to decide after analyzing factors such as target market, audience, market localization, and more.

Features

Next, we will discuss the development hours required for app features. It majorly influences the total development cost depending on the number of features and their complexity. The number of hours can also increase based on the complexity of backend features and third-party API or library integration.

Development partner and engagement model

The hourly rates of the development team are a significant influencer on the cost of developing a music app. It is mainly affected by the size of the team and their geographical location. But hiring resources with the right skills and experience is essential to any app development project. And you can do it in three ways given below:

• Hire Freelancers
• Hire an App development agency aka Outsourcing
• Hire Dedicated Remote Developers/Extended Team

Build a successful music app with Simform

While on-demand music streaming is a hot trend, you still have an opportunity to earn a chunk of music streaming market revenue with a million-dollar idea. But to capture a large audience and beat your competitors, your idea must be executed with perfection in an app. And our experts at Simform are happy to assist you in developing a successful music app. We have helped our clients create stunning yet innovative apps in numerous industries with highly experienced professionals.

Originally published at Simform: How to Make a Music App: Features, Tech, and Cost