Apple Music Classical Hit a Milestone, But Is There Real Demand?

A few weeks ago Apple launched a new app -- Apple Music Classical. Exactly what you'd expect from the name, and overall, not very interesting or exciting. But...

When it rolled out, Apple Music Classical was the top app on the App Store for a few hours. Right out of the gate.

That felt a little forced to me.

Luckily we can look at the trend to tell if that rank was really a result of massive demand for high-quality classical music or not.

If you're guessing it wasn't, you're probably right.

Downloads started high, which makes sense given the amount of visibility a top app gets. Our estimates show almost a half million downloads on launch day.

The rank didn't stick for long enough though. A week in, daily downloads were already below 100K and are now heading toward the 10K mark.

Let's zoom out - since launching, Apple Music Classical was downloaded 2.1M times from the App Store, according to our estimates. 44% of the downloads came from the US and the rest were spread across 100+ countries, including just a handful of downloads from Yemen and Bhutan.

I think it's fair to say that being ranked is still a great mode for discovery. That's a question I get asked often.

But back to the original question... was the initial rank driven by demand?

Actually, maybe!

See, Apple Music Classical isn't the first app to pull off a #1 rank on launch day. It's not common, but it definitely happened more than once, and if you follow the newsletter, you may know why.

Pre-orders!

Apple (and Google) let developers publish their apps as pre-orders before they officially launch. That means users can sign up to download the app as soon as it goes live, automatically. Do that enough time in advance, promote it, and drum up as many pre-orders as you can, and a half a million isn't that crazy.

If you're a developer, this should be on your earliest checklist, even before you start developing.