Planning to make some money on your own online music platform? Are you thinking of building something similar to Spotify? Let us be your guide to walk you through the process step by step. We know about multiple possible obstacles and traps, thus, our job is to help you avoid those pitfalls on the way to the dream. Shall we start?
Key functionalities of musical platforms such as Spotify
- Registry algorithm
The registration process shall be the most simplistic. Show some care to your future users and don’t make them click multiple times to get registered – you’ll simply irritate them. The following point might give you some ideas on how to facilitate the registration procedure.
- Profile
Your audience will definitely appreciate if their own profile pages shall provide data, like, user’s name, sex, birth date, favorite music genres, etc. That’s for you to see what the audience is looking for to guarantee you actually respond to their needs and demands. A professional mobile app design and development company implements such a strategy to achieve the best possible results.
- Personalized proposals
Users’ profiles shall give you enough information to propose the latest tunes to your customers. Most probably, users will enjoy them. Let’s take a peek at Spotify’s experience to improve audience loyalty – the “Discovery” function serves to present users newest tunes in accordance with their preferences.
- Notifications
The given option is your best friend since it represents a reminder for the audience to enjoy the app, it provides hints and informs users of upgrades and current discounts. So to say, it’s a mighty tool for unobtrusive advertising of all music apps, including yours.
- Musical content diversity
Customers who are familiar with Spotify principles are expecting the availability of various musical compositions. It would be another great idea to provide your customers with an opportunity to build and adjust their own personal playlists. It would be a great asset to your application if you find techniques to offer mentioned feature to users.
- Searching for tunes
Are you dreaming one day your musical program to become one of the market leaders? It definitely won’t happen without a search bar. Think about it.
- Messaging
Spotify owns its internal messaging solution for the audience to talk to each other sharing their impressions on a certain track. For sure, it’s not the biggest secret of Spotify’s popularity, but still why not add such great functionality to your online product?
- Social networks inclusion
Nowadays, it’s a must-have to engage Instagram and Facebook together with similar platforms to build a popular application. In 2011, after Spotify and Facebook came to be counterparts, people started to enjoy the mentioned parameter even more. For your information, the quantity of Spotify customers increased by one million within a few days after such an event. That could be a great motivation for you to include the mentioned feature.
And, at the same time, your users will post on their Facebook pages everything they do on your platform, thus, there’s another promotion source.
- Additional exciting options
Going above and beyond, Spotify offers its audience a few fun functionalities as an addition to the house. Take a look at them, as you might want to please your audience with something nice as well.
Spotify “Following” functionality was introduced in 2013. It allows users to be closer to who they care about, no matter if it’s a best friend or a favorite singer. Whenever that person is active on Spotify, users receive certain notifications. Spotify makes its users get closer to their beloved ones.
The browse function enables users to locate playlists of other Spotify customers, including famous persons. When people see composition on their idols’ playlist, they’d like to hear that song too.
Professional assistance
You’ll definitely require some help from experts with all the necessary skills to perform developing work at the top level. Being rather complicated, the developing process usually takes much time.
Thus, here’s the list of IT gurus you’ll need:
#1. A Project Manager
This person shall monitor the overall building process. Consider such a position as an intermediate link between you and the case.
#2. Designers of UX/UI
You hire them to get a clear and customer-oriented interface.
#3. Android, iPhone, and Web developers
Those pros are to carefully design a specific structure for your platform. They are to come up with clear and comprehensive coding.
#4. QA experts
Their task is to conduct a number of tests to guarantee your music service smooth continuous operating.
#5. Marketers
They don’t actually belong to IT gurus, but still, they’re very valuable members of your team. Their mission is to carry out promotion campaigns for your platform.
Mandatory phases of music service building
- Conduct marketing researches;
- Write down engineering specifications;
- Do prototyping;
- Come up with UX/UI design;
- Perform the musical service developing itself;
- Carry out tests;
- Launch and ensure proper maintenance of your online platform.
After figuring out the step-by-step procedure, let’s move on to the money aspects.
How much might it cost to build a service like Spotify?
Unfortunately, we aren’t able to indicate the specific amount of money you need to make your dream come true. An app designing process is too individual, and every particular case is different. It’s not like when you’re shopping you see a product and its fixed price. It’s a completely different story.
To calculate approximate costs to build a music platform you shall consider multiple points, like, rates of people you’ll hire, the level of your final product sophistication, etc.
Well, we are to specify key pricing issues for you to estimate potential costs to develop the music service of your dreams. Here we go.
Minimum Viable Product
MVP is one of the great available solutions to minimize your expenses for your program development. The approach is pretty simple: IT pros you hire are to build a platform with simple basic functionalities. Here they are:
- Registry possibility;
- Users’ profiles;
- Up-to-date compositions database;
- Database searching options;
- Some alternatives to Spotify’s “Discovery” feature, providing users tips and hints on tunes they’ll probably enjoy.
MVP is a good start. The next step would be to upgrade your service supplementing it with various outstanding functionalities.
Your geographical location
As a matter of fact, the geographical location of your business matters a lot. Of course, when selecting IT people to work on your project, you‘re looking for professionals with all the necessary skills. And still, remember that they’re other aspects that build the price of the work. The geolocation factor makes the developing price vary:
- the USA and Canada charge $150 and above per hour;
- Western Europe rates are $80-$180 per hour:
- Eastern Europe ask for $25-$80 per hour;
- India charges $15-$70 per hour.
Eastern Europe seems like the most optimal choice. You are free to refer to Indian pros as well, nevertheless, be aware that you might get a not clear enough code, thus, it’s your call.
Well, your approximate budget shall look like this:
- The MVP version: $50.000-$80.000
- Availability of various operating systems
Android only: $95.000-$150.000+
iOS only: $80.000-$120.000+
Android & iOS: $150.000-$190.000+
