How Spotify App Is Built

Did you ever think about what would life be without music? Well, there are too many definitions of music that cannot be defined in a single word. Music is something that we are all touched by. Music is something that can buoy your mood and fend off depression. Most of our days start with listening to music and end with the same. At home, morning walks, on the street with headphones, traveling, workplace and in the eternal waiting, the music is all around us.

In the last couple of decades, the music industry has grown up tremendously, all thanks to the new technology. Gone are the days when we managed to use Radio and Television to listen to music. And today, in the mobile-driven world, we all are known as the streaming generation that is using Spotify, Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal and iTunes apps to listen to music that we love. The advent of new technology is also making it more of a competitive field for artists, musicians, and music companies.

There are various music streaming applications in the market that have dominated the scene. Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal and Pandora are the most popular music streaming mobile applications that allow users to listen to music directly from the cloud without downloading it. Some apps let you listen for free, while others charge for a premium account.

As per the Statista report, the digital music industry has earned revenue of USD 7.8 billion in 2016. And, it’s expected that it would touch $ 10,961 million in 2021.

Top Players of Music Streaming Apps Market

Spotify

Let’s discuss the most popular music streaming application- Spotify.

What is Spotify?

Spotify is a Swedish based Audio Streaming Platform, which is ruling the music streaming digital market with over 140 million people worldwide. Over 50 million of them are handling premium account to access the full content. It has over 30 million songs or tracks in its library that can conveniently be listened to online without downloading them. Launched in 2008, this multi-billion app has greatly revolutionized the music streaming industry. The total revenue of the company is $5.98 billion (FY 2018), while the net profit is $88.65 million (FY 2018). Still, people don’t know how to make a music app for android.

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. Choose licensing type. As for Spotify, the platform has two types of licenses including Sound Recording License. The Spotify App is built into the Infotainment system, requiring Spotify Premium, and accordingly I installed it. I logged in with my email and password (same ones used on my desktop & cell) and the Infotainment system just shows a small green rotating circle, eventually followed with a “failed to connect” message – “try again.”.

How does Spotify work?

Spotify runs on all operating systems, including iOS, Android, Window and supported Smart TVs. Users can access their favorite tracks from over 30 million songs/tracks for free by signing or logging into the account. Basically, Spotify is offering a free and premium account that carries different properties. In the free account, you can’t download songs to listen in offline mode, and you will get unwanted ads while listening to music. However, premium accounts are unrestricted. The monthly subscription for a premium account costs $9.99. This price covers unlimited access to a huge vault of music.

Spotify offers the following plans

  • Free subscription: Lets users listen to limited music with ads in between the music.
  • Subsidized subscription: These plans include combined plans for families and student plans.
  • Premium subscription: This plan unlocks various advanced features, and allows full access to contact.

You Can Consider The Following Features In Your Music Streaming App Like- Spotify

What makes Spotify the best music streaming app? Its eye-catching design and functionality make it better. Let’s discuss the features of the music streaming app.

  • Registration: This is the essential feature if you are offering a premium account. You can ask your users for their information. To get into the mobile application and access the huge collection of free music, users need to create an account by providing basic information, including Name, Email ID, Mobile Number, and Age. By registering themselves, the users can unlock the advanced features of the mobile application.
  • User Profile: In this section, users can provide their information to the admin. The user can also update their profile by making changes in their information. In the user profile, the users can set their music preferences.
  • Discovery and Search: Discovery or search is what you are proving to your users of their choices. This is the essential feature that allows your users to find the songs or track of their choices. In this, users can search for the music by artists, songs, albums, podcasts or genre.
  • Recommendation: This is the best way to connect with users. You can add this feature in your music streaming applications to recommend songs as per their searches. This feature will help to anticipate the user’s music choices and make recommendations based on the same.
  • Social Sharing: It’s said that success comes through promotion. The social sharing feature plays an important role in the success of the business. By giving your listeners an option to share their favorite song, track, or playlist directly through WhatsApp, and Instagram Direct Message.
  • Online and Offline Access: Online or offline content access is crucial to stay longer in the smart devices of your listeners. Offline access, this is the best feature that lets your listeners enjoy their favorite track or songs without any dependency on the internet connection. Online access will allow your listeners to access all the latest content with ease and even they can download the songs to access in offline mode.
  • Creating Playlist: You are providing a platform to your listeners to enjoy the features of the music app. Thus, creating a playlist is what you are allowing your users to save or add their favorite songs in one place. The saved songs can be accessed directly or you can create a number of playlists according to your choice.
  • Push Notification: Push notifications is not a must-have feature, but it’s a most useful feature through which you can amaze your listeners through amazing offers, recently added songs, discounts, and more.
  • In-app Messages: In-app messaging is all about interacting with others through personal messages within the app itself.

Here Are 5 Methods That You Can’t Ignore To Develop An App Similar to the Spotify.

User Interface: There are various music streaming apps running in the market. Some of them are doing well while some are not. Are you serious about your music streaming app? Then you need to focus on uniqueness. User Interface, it’s the main point where the users interact with the design. You should consider a gesture-based 3D design interface with bodily motions.

Platforms: You can build and run your music streaming app for one platform of your choice, if you are getting a huge response from the listeners then you can choose other platforms- mobile and web. Do you know? Spotify has started its journey with a web-based platform. After a few years, they launched a mobile application for both Android and iOS.

Uses of Devices:

Copyright & Legality: Licensing & Copyright, it’s the most important aspect that you need to consider while music streaming app development like Spotify. Remember your music content should be legal or licensed. It’s a so-called legitimate environment where you need to follow the rules to provide your music streaming services. In the United States, it can be handled by one of three agencies- The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) or Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI). Whereas, if you want to provide streaming music services in Europe, then you have to get approval from the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC). Moreover, a particular share will have to be paid to artists, bands or musicians for using their content or music.

Monetization: Applying monetization models will help you earn massive revenue from the music streaming application. In the music industry market, most apps of this type rely on various monetization models. Provide your listeners with free access to your music streaming service. In the subscription-based monetization model, allow your customers who wish to download music of their choices.

Spotify App For Windows 10

Data Storage: Data storage, it’s also a matter of concern, you have to focus on data storage, where a large amount of content will be stored. For this, you can consider such services as Amazon S3 bucket, and Google Cloud Storage. The mobile app developers keep focussing on cloud storage because thousands of requests hit per second.

Business Model Canvas for a Spotify-like app

Technologies (Language & Framework)

  • Platforms: Android and iOS
  • Web: PHP, CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript, JQuery
  • Hosting: Amazon Cloud

Music Streaming Architecture

Technology That You Can Use To Perform Varieties of Task

  • Twilio – for Push Notifications
  • Cloud Environment – AWS, Google, Azure
  • Amazon S3-For Data Backup
  • Google & Facebook SDK– For Social Login
  • Stripe, Braintree, PayPal- For Secure Payment Integration
  • Nexmo – for SMS, voice and phone verification

How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Music Streaming App Like- Spotify

How can one start developing? Take a look at the factors or certain things that we have discussed above. These factors are very useful and help you if you are serious about your music streaming app idea. The success of Spotify has encouraged several app developers, music streaming app development companies or startups around the world to build a similar app like Spotify and replicate this success.

The development cost of developing music streaming app like Spotify is based on various factors. Whether it’s development, marketing or licensing. Any music streaming app development company or mobile app developer can’t come with the exact cost. The total cost of music mobile app development depends on the features, design, technology, and platforms.

There are various music app development companies in the market the charge per hour basis. Thus, locations also matter, the cost of app development also depends on the locations as of where the app is being developed. Cost comparison of app development in details. Such as,

  • US-based companies or developers cost- $150-$250, excluding QA.
  • Western Europe based companies or developers cost- $100-$180, excluding QA
  • Eastern Europe based companies or developers cost- $130-$210, excluding QA
  • India based companies or developers cost- $20-40$, including QA.

The expected development cost of the Spotify clone app is around $25000 for Android and $35000 for Android and $15000 for the website.

Want to create a music streaming app? Feel free to contact us and share your idea.

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.

Spotify

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.

How Is Spotify Desktop App Built

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.

Spotify App Download For Pc

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.

Install Spotify App

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

How Spotify App Is Built Better

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!