Music App Usage on the iPad is Looooooow
Digital Music News explores the iPad and how music apps are being used on the device.
“There are 2,463 iPad Music apps on the paid side, and 991 on the free, according to the iTunes Store. That’s a seemingly-healthy total of 3,454 apps, yet the broader iPad total recently crossed 100,000.”
It doesn’t take a math wizard (actually – it might) to determine that this means only music apps comprise 3.5% of all the apps for the iPad. An earlier post on PeteHatesMusic revealed that music ranked 5th for apps obtained in the past 30 days across all phone platforms.
“So how does this all compare to the iPhone? We’ve heard a whisper estimate of 400,000 total iPhone apps, though Appshopper pegs the total at 378,452. Of that, music-focused apps total 15,916, or about 4.2 percent of the total. Perhaps more telling is a far different free-to-paid ratio: there are 7,269 iPhone music apps on the paid side, and 8,647 on the free side.”
Do Games dominate because of their distraction value? How about the ratio of free (or often Lite) versions of games to paid games? With the iPod feature built in, does the casual music listener really need apps? Should music apps be more prominent in the app world? With the recent introduction of Spotify to America, and with the iCloud rolling in later this year, can we expect this to change? I would think that the rate at which Spotify has been embraced in America, this is bound to change. With musicians like Bjork and Soulwax producing apps with music tie ins, maybe they have found an untapped market.
