How to Build SaaS App Like Spotify

In today's digital age, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications are becoming more and more popular due to their many benefits. This isn’t only a fast and affordable way to develop a new application, but also cost-effective in terms of the budget allocated for the development team.

Among the many apps based on SaaS, a separate place is occupied by music streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon Music and others. These popular music streaming applications have changed the way users access and consume music content.

In this article, we’ll tell you how to make an application like the most successful music streaming service — Spotify. The value of Spotify decreased by 53.4%, from $44.83 billion in Q4 2021 to $20.9 billion in Q1 2022. We will talk about other impressive numbers a little bit later.

We have prepared for you a lot of useful information about the important app features, the necessary documentation and the tech stack. Keep reading! 😉

 
 

👁 Overview of Spotify as a SaaS App

Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming services with over 500 million customers in 180 countries and 205 million subscribers. The service operates as a Software-as-a-Service application. Let's take a look at the main SaaS features that underlie Spotify.

1. Spotify is a non-downloadable software that needs to be installed on a local device.

2. Spotify is available over the Internet and runs on a remote server. The users easily access their library from a music streaming website or app.
3. Spotify has various tariff plans and everyone can choose the one that suits them best. Whether it’s a family subscription, student or regular.
4. The service constantly updates the library and functions, improving the client experience each time.
5. Spotify is convenient. In the application, you can create your own playlists, find new tracks, share music on social networks and listen to recommendations based on the user's musical preferences.

The Spotify SaaS model not only provides a user experience for listening to music, but also benefits content creators and rights holders. The app offers a variety of tools and data analytics to help artists promote their music.

 
 

👩‍💻 Why Should you Make Music Streaming Apps Like Spotify?

Probably, starting to read this article, you ask yourself the question: Why do I have to create my own music streaming app? There are so many of them on the music streaming app market and there’s a big risk of just losing all the money.”

Of course, there are always risks. But with a competent approach to the music app development process, those risks can be avoided.

One of the biggest benefits of building a popular music streaming app like Spotify is the ability to monetize it. You’ve already familiarized yourself a little with the number of Spotify subscribers in the previous section, but let's now look at the financial benefits of such an application. In total, Spotify offers 5 types of subscriptions:

• Spotify free or Freemium model (listening to music with limited functionality and ads)
• Spotify Premium (ad-free listening, offline playback)
• Spotify Duo (subscription for two people)
• Spotify Family (maximum 6 family members)
• Spotify Student (for university students)

Subscription prices range from $5 to $15. In addition, the Spotify app makes money from advertising (for free users), partnerships, merchandise and data.

 
 

👥 How to Stand out from Competitors?

There are many big players in the music streaming market that are difficult to compete with. Difficult but real! We’ve put together a few tips for you to help you create a high-quality product.

1. Pay special attention to the Project Discovery stage.

At this stage, you will analyze and document all the requirements for the future application. The purpose of a discovery project is to identify all possible risks, estimate costs, determine business processes, user needs, and functionality that should be included in the project.

2. Work on the usability and design of the application.

It's the conveniently functional interface that will help you attract customers.

3. Take a look at using React Native.

This is a cross-platform framework, so you can create an application on iOS and Android at the same time. In addition, React Native has a simple and intuitive syntax that allows you to easily integrate the application with external libraries, such as libraries for working with sound and music.

You can also quickly and easily make changes to the application, which is especially important given the frequent changes in the music industry and user requirements.

 
 

📱 Features to Include in the Music Streaming App

In this section, we will talk about the essential features that a successful music streaming app should have. And also, we will tell you how to improve some of them. Thank you for continuing to read!

Registration / Signing up 👋

This is the first screen that any user of the application encounters. It’s very important to make it intuitive. And as an additional convenience, a good solution would be to add the ability to register via email or social networks.

User Profile 🧑‍💻

Having a profile in the application allows the user to manage their preferences (for example, playlists, favorite songs or music library). This screen should have a user-friendly interface so that anyone can set up their profile.

Audio Streaming 🎵

The main feature of any music streaming service. Thanks to audio streaming apps, the user can listen to tracks online.

Personalized Playlists 🎶

Based on the analysis of user behavior, the application can offer personalized playlists. Thus, you can further engage customers in using your particular product.

Search and filter 🔎

Set up a search function and think of all possible filters for the convenience of your users. Search by artist, by title, by music genres, by words, by release date, by country, and so on.

Displaying Lyrics 🎤

With this feature, you can view the lyrics of the song and even sing along. Who doesn't like to imagine themselves as their favorite artist or lead singer of a group? 😉

In addition to the already well-known feature with synchronous karaoke-style text selection, many creative ideas can be implemented on this screen, for example:

• Responsive design depending on the “mood” of the song. You can play around with fonts or colors.
• Under the lyrics, you can add the ability to play a clip or standard animation.
• You can add the ability to copy/add lyrics from a song to notes on your phone. Or even make it a separate function in the application!

Download Option ⬇️

Despite the prevalence of 5G networks, this feature is still in demand by many users. Someone doesn’t want to spend gigabytes of the Internet once again, and someone listens to music on trips or in nature. So, the function of downloading music must be in an application like Spotify.

Payment and Subscription System 💳

Add as many payment methods for subscriptions as possible so that the user can choose the option that is convenient for them.

All things social 🌐

This feature will help users find new friends, listen to their playlists, share music, and more. Thanks to the social feature, users can find each other through various social networks, subscribe to and follow each other's musical preferences.

Admin panel 💻

Don't forget about the other side of the Spotify-type app, namely the admin panel that will help you keep track of all the important vitals of the app. Thanks to the administration panel, you will be able to conduct analytics of all the functions of your audio streaming app.

In order for the administrative panel to be easy to use, don’t forget about the following main functions:

• Content management. Ability to add a large number of new tracks/albums/artists at the same time, edit, and manage them.
• Music license management. We will talk about this in the next section.
• Management and analytics of advertising campaigns.
• Service subscription management and analytics.

Keep reading to know about helpful tech stack!

👓 Licensing

Music streaming services allow users to listen to music without buying. But, the service itself needs several types of licenses for the legal use of music content. This is a necessary step in creating an app like Spotify.

Since, in this article, we paid special attention to Spotify, let's look at what types of music distribution agreements it has:

• Sound Recording License Agreement. Spotify app uses licenses from the three largest music labels in the world (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment Group, and Warner Music Group).
• Musical Composition License Agreement This is a license agreement with the music content owner.

Depending on the region, several large companies handle public use rights. In the US, these are the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI).

And in Europe, to obtain public use rights, you must apply to the Society of Authors and Composers of Europe (SESAC).

Using music content without proper licenses can permanently damage your service's reputation and lead to lawsuits and fines ($30,000 to $150,000). Therefore, it’s worth remembering in advance about licensing your service.

 
 

🤖 Tech Stack for Music Streaming App Development

In this section, we’ve collected all the technical tools for you so that the development process of the application is easy and doesn’t take much time. You can consult with your development team and choose the most suitable development path for your project.

1. React Native is a framework that will help you create an app on iOS and Android at the same time.
2. Kafka software will help you manage and process data in real-time.
3. GraphWalker will reduce development time through model testing.
4. Amazon S3 is a cloud-based solution for music streaming application.
5. Bootstrap is a popular web application development framework.
6. For your admin panel you can use React Admin, Django Admin, Vue.js Admin, Flask Admin or KeystoneJS. There are many solutions depending on your needs and programming language.
7. RabbitMQ can be used to control the flow of music tracks, messages between the application and the server, and other tasks.
8. Wowza Media Server is a server for transferring media content in real-time.

 
 

💵 Cost to Make a SaaS App Like Spotify

Well, developing a music streaming app like Spotify isn’t an easy task. In addition, the time and complexity of development depend on many factors. Here you can see the estimated cost of developing such an application together with the Stormotion team.

In the preparation of approximate calculations, we focus on the average cost of 50$ per hour. Based on the amount of time it takes to build an app like Spotify, this will cost between 60,000$ and 125,000$.

In order to calculate the exact audio streaming app cost, taking into account all your wishes, write to us and tell us all the details of your project!

 
 

👂 Takeaways

As you can see, creating a music streaming app like Spotify is a very complex and painstaking process. In order for your application to be able to compete with the big players in the sound streaming market, you need to work out all the important development stages well.

Let's summarize the above text:

• In order to compete in the music streaming industry, it is important to work out the app idea well.
• In addition to the basic features, consider additional app features that will be in your service. For example, an exclusive podcast output. This will attract the audience in the early stages.
• Pay special attention to the issue of licenses that your future app must have.
• Choose a convenient technology stack that will allow you to save time and money in music app development.

We hope you have a better understanding of how the world of music streaming apps works. Even though it’s a very difficult job, it can be a very profitable business.