Music Streaming App Development Cost Guide [2025]

Is your business goal to launch a brand-new music streaming app with the inspiration of Spotify's success or to carve out your unique niche in the music streaming world? It’s an enticing multi-billion-dollar audio streaming business fueled by music lovers. Launching a music streaming app needs a primary investment and time to bring your vision to life. In this blog, we delve into the multiple costs associated with developing a music streaming business app tailored to meet different needs. 

Cost Breakdown of Music Streaming App

A lot of entrepreneurs have a question about the cost of developing a full-fledged music streaming app for their business. The cost of developing a music streaming app ranges from $40,000 to $250,000+. Why such a massive range? Because building a music streaming app isn't a one-size-fits-all project. It consists of a small number of high-tech items based on various factors such as complexity level, feature implementation, and so on. Here we give the cost of a music streaming app, which depends on multiple influential factors. Below is a detailed breakdown:

Smart Strategies to Manage Costs

We listed out some strategies to manage app development costs.

Start with an MVP

Initially, start your music streaming platform with concentrated core features. Once your business idea succeeds with real users, then invest money in your business to develop your music streaming app.

Prioritize any one of the platforms

In the beginning, you should focus on any one of the platforms: Android, iOS, or web. Depending on the people’s reception later of those who choose to expand their business to multiple platforms.

Consider Niche

Initially, concentrate on niche-related aspects such as genre, artist type, or features (e.g., indie artists, lossless only, curated discovery). This will simplify your song licensing and reduce the complexity of the app.

Utilize Third-Party Services

Use third-party APIs for your music streaming app for payment (Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay), for cloud storage (AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage), for analytics (Mixpanel, Appsee, Amplitude), and royalty management (Performing Rights Organizations (PROs) and Collective Management Organizations (CMOs)).

Outsource Strategically

Consider developing your platform with these affordable, talented experts from these locations, like Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. They have strong technical skills and are capable of fulfilling the market's expected tech stacks.

Plan Licensing Early

A legal expert should know about handling music rights in their career to know the cost and legal complexities before deciding on the app development. Or else explore other options like royalty-free in the starting stage, or use existing partnered song distributors.

Scalable Architecture

Invest upfront in a backend that can grow efficiently to avoid costly rewrites later. That will save most of the development cost, money to can use the money to improve your app in a better way.

What are the Factors that will decide your Music Streaming App Development?

Let's explore the key factors that will affect the cost of developing your music streaming app.

App Platform

Choosing your suitable music streaming app platform is arduous on any Android or iOS because you are targeting both platforms using cross-platform frameworks like React Native or Flutter that reduce a single codebase. That saves 30% of the cost compared to native app development. Nevertheless, a native app offers top-notch performance and app user experience. Which one suits your business demand? Accordingly, choose one type of app platform for music app development.

App Features

Overall, app complexity entirely depends on what kind of features and functionalities you incorporate into your music streaming app. Here’s what we listed out and classified the app features into three stages, like

Basic Features

It includes a basic level of required music streaming user features like search, profile management, user authentication, and playback/podcast support. For instance, the complexity cost range of this type of app is between $30,000 and $50,000, and it typically takes 3 to 6 months to complete.

Intermediate Features

This kind of category of app consists of features like personalization recommendations, offline listening, playlists, social sharing, and lyrics sync support. These features backed the app's cost range of 60,000 to 120,000. Overall, it takes 6 to 8 months to get a well-furnished app.

Advanced Features

In this category, a music streaming app aims to develop features such as AI-driven music discovery, the option for multiple high-fidelity (Hi-Fi) audio ranges, video streaming of songs, smart device integration, and support for multiple platforms. In this category, the cost ranges from over $150,000, and it takes more than 10 months to create a feature-rich music streaming app.

Development Team

The app development team plays a significant role in influencing the cost. Here’s the list of outsourcing your app developers from these regions, such as 

1. North America/Western Europe: $100-$250+/hour

2. Eastern Europe: $50-$150/hour

3. Asia (India, Philippines): $25-$80/hour

Or else choose a mobile app development company that gives you more control, transparent communication, and mid-range cost. Overall, it takes your budget from 60% to 80% of the amount.

Design & User Experience (UX/UI)

On the whole, a music streaming app is expected to play a major role in achieving user engagement and offering user-friendly feature options. These kinds of useful things placement will take time with incorporating your brand logo, colour schemes, and animations to be tested with multiple scenarios to get the complete music streaming app development cost may vary. For the approach, your platform design starts from Wireframing, prototyping, and creating a visually appealing and intuitive interface across all platforms.

Backend Infrastructure

Handling users' tasks like consecutive traffic, streaming higher quality, and playlist management in an effective way depends on a well-optimised back-end infrastructure. Regarding that, you’ll need a proper cloud storage like AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob. For a scalable database, it uses PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Cassandra. For faster streaming, get a responsive CDN from Cloudflare or Akamai. In any case, you’ll need API’s for getting information about artists, albums, and lyrics. 

Above these are all things that should be handled and scalable to manage the millions of users; you’ll need a fine-tuned, backed optimisation. Thereto you’ll spend a significant amount of funds, approximately $15,000 to $80,000 it depending on your requirements.

Licensing

To bang a music rights deal from record labels, music publishers, and individual artists/songwriters that takes a considerable amount of money. The average cost for acquiring music rights starts at $20,000 to $300,000+, depending on your music collection.

Ongoing Costs

Developing a music app isn’t the only thing apart from that it also needs some maintenance costs that will add up for your business. Here are the possible costs that will be taken into account as bug fixes, feature updates, music royalties, marketing, user acquisition, payment processing fees, app maintenance, and security patches.

Final Thoughts

Developing a music streaming app needs both technological and financial resources. If your business goal is to start from a basic level, it takes around $40,000-$80,000, or else you’re competing with pro-players like Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal, which need $200,000 to $500,000, based as we mentioned above cost factors. Before embarking on your business journey with a music streaming app, you should focus on aspects such as the business scope, target audience, and revenue streams (e.g., subscriptions, ads, or freemium models).  

If you’re looking to develop a music streaming app, then join hands with Appticz, leading music streaming app development company that caters extradinary ondemand music app and audio app development services with customized music app solutions and the combination of top-notch techies and industry experts that will help you create your meticulously planned music streaming app. Contact us