Web & AppThe central component of user engagement is the availability of the music and the ability to discover similar genres.

While we use music apps, we don’t realize how many kinds of music apps exist on the market. But if you want to create your own music app, you need to choose among:

• Music Streaming
• Music Store
• Music Storage
• Let’s look at them one by one.

Music Streaming Apps :
Such apps as Soundcloud, Spotify, and Apple Music are the most widely used music streaming apps. The primary purpose of the music streaming application is to play music available in the databases of the service, compose custom playlists and suggest similar songs. The main elements of music streaming apps are:

Discovery. The central component of user engagement is the availability of the music and the ability to discover similar genres.

Recommendations. To provide users with more relevant recommendations you need to implement a recommender engine to your music streaming app.

Personalization and deep categorization. The music can be sorted by period, genre, performer association (solo albums of band members) or by more ephemeral characteristics such as mood (happy, sad, romantic), tone (dark, brooding, sunshiny), or pace (fast, slow, waltz) of the compositions.

Social networking. You can apply custom playlists as promotional or educational tools. Thus, users can share playlists with friends via social media platforms.

When developing your music app, consider the following requirements for music streaming services:

Public Performance License, issues by ASCAP, BMI or SESAC for the U.S. and by PPL PRS for U.K. services
Diverse categorization system to tag content Extensive integration with social media platforms

As well as this, you can also integrate a ready-made solution, such as Spotify API to an existing app to give users a unique experience, as we did for the Spotnews project. The idea behind Spotnews is to help users be aware of the latest news while listening to their favorite music on Spotify. For Spotnews, we used Spotify SDK to allow users to authorize the app via their existing Spotify account.

2. Select the main features for the music app
If you are looking for ideas on how to make a music app, consider the list of main music app features below.

Registration / signing up : An essential option that identifies the user to synchronize his playlist and music in service.

You may use social media authorization and enjoy getting new subscribers in a matter of taps.

Track search : Give users the capability to find music they want to hear and you’ll get an army of loyal users.

Catalog : Provide users with a music catalog to help them find how many musics contents your service offers. It might seem obvious, but there are a lot of bad examples on the market when developers have ignored this feature.

Push notifications : Recent research discovered that push notifications lead to higher engagement across all categories, but most of all, impact a music apps’ engagement. See exactly how on the chart below.

Other Features to consider : You might consider this list for the second development stage of your app when the time comes to improve your app with additional features.

High performance. As the critical features of leading services are almost the same, the app’s performance may become the deciding point. The app needs to present good speed and less resource consumption. It should take less than 300ms for the music to start playing from the moment a listener has selected a song.

Bitrates. To stream music, it should be digitized, i.e., broken down into a series of audio snapshots. Then, our brains interpret all these snapshots together as a continuous sound. The quality of streaming music is called bitrate. There are three different audio qualities available for mobile apps:

• Normal (96kbps)
• High (160kbps)
• Extreme (320kbps)

High-resolution sound aims to give you CD-like, or better than CD-sound, in a convenient package of streaming from your phone or as a digital file on a dedicated player.