Music Beats All Mobile App Categories As Time In App Increases 79%
Localytics, an app analytics and marketing company, crunches a lot of numbers. They took stats from the last year and looked at "time in app" as a metric for comparing app categories. Music apps outperformed between August 2013 and August 2014 with a 79% increase in time in app. This growth likely reflects the overall shift towards greater use of mobile apps with music leading the way.
Localytics say they currently reach "25,000 apps, 1.5 billion devices and 50 billion data points monthly."
From that wealth of data they took a look at the last 12 months:
"For this study, Localytics multiplied the average sessions per user in app by the average session length across all apps, and then broke it by category. The timeframe for this study is August 2013 to August 2014."
Of course, looking at averages and aggregates may not tell you a lot about your situation but, especially in this case, they can give you a sense of larger shifts.
Localytics focused on the number of times apps were launched and how long people spent while using the app. The following chart shows how much more time in app grew for music apps than for other apps in the last 12 months (click to enlarge):
Localytics notes:
"As more people shift from iTunes to music apps such as SoundCloud and iHeartRadio, the time spent in music apps has drastically increased. These apps offer greater flexibility around music genres, playlists, and radio features."
"Most music apps also incorporate a social component, allowing people to share their favorite playlists. These reasons could explain why music has seen such a strong time in app increase over the past year."
Given that they're apparently separating iTunes as a music player from other apps, it does appear to be one of the stronger indicators of the overall shift to use of dedicated mobile apps over other options.
Music also has the highest session length at 8.9 minutes per session in August 2014.
If you also consider that other categories such as games, entertainment and social networking will include music or music-related content, then you can see that music has an enormous presence in mobile apps.
More:
App Annie Report Reveals Importance Of Mobile Apps For Digital Music Revenue
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch) recently launched DanceLand. Send news about music tech startups and services, DIY music biz and music marketing to: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
