People are Paying for Music
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #95 - What to Expect in 2022. Check out the full article for more insights.
Another thing you can stream that now even more people are willing to open their wallets for is music.
Like dating and movie streaming apps, the last couple of years have seen a lot of revenue growth for music streaming apps.
To see how much growth I've added up the top music apps by revenue, which include YouTube Music, Pandora, Tidal, SoundCloud, and Amazon Music, and looked at their in-app revenue. Since most of them monetize directly on Android, this chart consists of US revenue only from the App Store.
Wait, what about Spotify? Although Spotify is the name in music, its war with Apple means they're not the highest earners in the bunch and their revenue is declining. I did not include them in this analysis because of that.
Led by Pandora, net revenue of the top 5 apps in the App Store grew to $47M in December of 2021. That's an increase of 47% over January of 2020, which was a higher than normal month. And no, I didn't play with the data so the % and $ end up the same.
When we zoom in a bit more, it gets even more interesting. Pandora, which was the market leader in 2020, actually dipped a bit in 2021 and made way for YouTube Music to take over. The two added $14M and $16M, respectively, in December of 2021 according to our estimates.
Clearly, streaming is here to stay grow, in all forms that we can consume.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
