Should my entertainment app focus on music?

Entertainment apps are a large category, and music sits right at the heart of what people associate with the word. So when a founder asks whether their app should focus on music, the question sounds straightforward. It is not. Music as a content vertical carries specific licensing commitments, API dependencies, and user expectation patterns that change the shape of the product before a single screen is designed. The question worth asking first is whether music is the right emotional fit for the people you are building for, not just the most obvious answer to "what kind of entertainment app is this?"

The question is not which content type is popular, but which one fits the emotional job your users are hiring for.

According to Statista, Q1 2024, entertainment apps were the highest-grossing mobile app category globally, generating almost nine billion US dollars in revenue in a single quarter. That scale does not mean music is the default right choice inside that category. It means the competition for attention is real, and the cost of building the wrong product is high.

We work with founders at the point where these decisions are still live, and the pattern we see repeatedly is that music gets chosen early, often because the founder loves music, and the structural consequences of that choice only become clear much later. This article works through those consequences so the decision can be made with open eyes.

What the music vertical actually commits you to

Choosing music as your core content type is a legal and technical decision that determines your cost structure from day one. Music licensing is a $31.7 billion industry, according to Foxi Music, and a meaningful share of that value flows through licensing agreements that sit between your app and the catalogue your users expect to access. Without those agreements, you are not building a music app. You are building a product that points at music and cannot touch it.

The practical commitment looks like this. To stream licensed music to users, you need agreements with rights holders, which typically means the major labels, independent distributors, and performing rights organisations. Each agreement takes time and legal resource to negotiate. The costs are ongoing, not one-off, and they scale with usage. A small user base does not cost much, but the fees grow as the product grows, which means your monetisation model has to account for a cost floor that rises alongside your revenue.

API dependency changes your product scope

Most founders sidestep direct licensing by integrating with an existing platform's API. That is a reasonable approach, but it transfers control. The platform sets the rules for what you can build, what users must do to access content, and whether your use case is even permitted. We experienced this directly on a proof-of-concept project for a company building an app to share memories with audio attached. We initially looked at integrating with Spotify for short audio clips. Spotify lacked a robust API for clips, and users would have needed a Spotify account, which broke the experience before it started.

We switched to Deezer, which had a robust API, supported clips, and did not require users to be logged in. The catalogue was larger than Spotify's, and when users wanted a full track, there was a natural upsell to a Deezer subscription, creating affiliate referral revenue alongside the product itself. The API choice reshaped the product's revenue model entirely.

Why emotional motivation matters before you pick a content type

Content type is a delivery mechanism. The thing it delivers is an emotional experience, and the emotional experience is what users are actually coming for. A fitness app that uses music to push people through a workout is solving a different emotional problem than a social app that uses music to help people share memories. Both use music. Neither is the same product. Choosing music before understanding which emotional job your app is doing is choosing the delivery mechanism before knowing what it is meant to carry.

This matters because different emotional states require different design responses. A user who opens an app feeling anxious about a decision wants something that reduces cognitive load. A user who opens an app to celebrate wants something that amplifies energy. Music can serve both, but the way it is presented, the controls given, the pace of the interface, and the degree of personalisation required are all different. If you have not defined the emotional state you are designing for, you cannot know whether music is the right answer or just the first one that came to mind.

A useful diagnostic is to ask what users are feeling at the moment they reach for your app. Not what they want to do, but how they feel. The answer to that question should drive content type, interface behaviour, and feature priority before any other consideration. Forty-four per cent of survey respondents cited fun and entertainment as a top reason for downloading an app, according to Clutch via Appcues, but fun is a category containing dozens of distinct experiences, and only some of them are best served by music.

Feature parity is not enough: what music apps get wrong about user adoption

There is a common assumption that building a music app with a strong catalogue and clean playback will be enough to attract users. It will not. Feature parity does not produce adoption. Users do not switch to a new music app because it plays songs. They switch because something about the experience fits a need their current app does not meet, and that need is almost always emotional before it is functional.

A feature that works well in one context does not automatically work in another. The controls that suit a gym playlist are different from those that suit background music during a work session. The social sharing mechanic that works for a music discovery product is disruptive in a focus app. Context and emotional state shape whether a feature is useful or intrusive, and a product that transplants features without understanding that distinction will feel wrong in ways users cannot articulate but will act on by leaving.

Features do not drive adoption; the emotional fit of the experience does.

On the sports club app we worked on, two co-founders pushed continuously to add more features, each convinced their additions were obvious and already implied by the product's purpose. Both founders lived and worked inside the world the app was designed for, which made it hard for them to see what a new user would actually experience. The result was a product that grew in feature count without growing in clarity. The lesson applies directly to music apps: adding playlist features, social layers, and discovery tools without a clear picture of the emotional state you are designing for produces a product that feels busy rather than right.

Before adding a feature to your music app, define the emotional state the user is in when they would use it. If you cannot name that state, the feature does not have a clear home in the product.

What API and licensing choices reveal about your real product scope

The API and licensing decisions a founder makes reveal more about the real scope of their product than any feature list does. When we switched from Spotify to Deezer on the memory-sharing proof-of-concept project, the technical route became simpler as well as more capable. Working with Spotify without a proper API would have required significant workarounds and custom-built solutions to stay within Spotify's rules. Using Deezer's official API in the way Deezer intended meant we were fully compliant without any of those workarounds, simplifying both the architecture and the compliance burden.

That experience showed us something worth holding onto. The API you choose is not just a technical integration. It defines what your product can and cannot do, who can use it without friction, and whether your revenue model has room to grow. A product built on an API that requires users to have an existing account with another service has already narrowed its addressable audience before the first user arrives.

Mapping your content choices against your scope

The table above is a tool for mapping what each choice commits you to before the first line of code is written. The right route depends on your product's emotional purpose, not on which API is easiest to integrate.

How to tell whether your music focus is founder preference or user evidence

The most reliable sign that a music focus is founder preference rather than user evidence is that the founder cannot point to a specific user problem music solves. They can point to music as a category they love, or describe the product as a music app without being able to say why music specifically serves the people they are building for. That gap matters because it predicts a particular failure pattern.

We identified this pattern across two projects, a fitness and wellness app and a grassroots football product, where founders with strong personal conviction in their vision ignored data coming from research, focus groups, and surveys. In both cases, the product became shaped by the founder's preferences rather than user evidence. Both projects exhausted their budgets in design and build without ever reaching a fully live product. We flagged the trajectory early in both cases. The warning signs were the same: an excessive drive to perfect the product before launch, repeated requests to revisit signed-off decisions, and prolonged decision-making that kept the product stationary.

Ask yourself whether you can name three specific users, their emotional state when they open the app, and why music serves that state better than another content type. If you cannot answer all three, the music focus needs more validation before it drives technical decisions.

A pre-launch founder in the football industry came to us with a colour-coded spreadsheet mapping competitor products, with the aim of merging multiple existing tools into one. The founder was visibly excited. When we began asking questions about prospective users, why someone would choose a combined product over specialised apps and whether consolidation would weaken individual features, the excitement faded. Our job is to be honest about what will make a product succeed, and that honesty sometimes means slowing down a decision that feels obvious to the founder.

Pricing, monetisation, and the cost-of-production trap

Founders who come from a music background often carry a specific pricing problem into their app. They know what it cost to produce the recordings. They want to recoup that cost quickly. And so they anchor the price of the app to their own production expenses rather than to what users will actually pay for a consumer app experience. On a music app project we worked on, the client could not separate what they had spent making the recordings from what customers would pay. They wanted to recoup within weeks, which is not how consumer app economics work.

The cost-of-production anchor does two things. It sets prices too high for early adoption, which slows the user growth needed to validate the product. And it prevents the founder from even considering a lower price point or a longer-term volume strategy, because both of those feel like accepting a loss on work that is already done.

The subscription model changes the conversation

Consumer apps that carry ongoing licensing costs almost always move toward subscription models, because subscriptions create predictable revenue that can be matched against predictable costs. But subscription pricing requires a clear answer to why a user would pay monthly for this experience rather than an existing alternative. That answer has to come from the emotional experience the product delivers, not from the size of the catalogue or the quality of the audio. A subscription price is a claim that the experience is worth returning to, and that claim has to be earned through design before it can be charged for through billing.

Build your pricing model from what users would pay to keep using the product, not from what it cost to make the content. Run both numbers separately before combining them into a business case.

When music is the right answer

Music is the right answer when the emotional job your users are hiring for is one that music uniquely serves. Focus and concentration, physical exertion, emotional memory, social bonding around shared taste, these are all emotional states where music has a specific and documented effect on experience. If your product is designed to serve one of those states, and the research confirms that users in that state reach for music, then music is a design decision with a clear rationale behind it.

The memory-sharing project was a good example of this. The emotional job was helping people attach feeling to a specific moment and share that with someone else. Music, as a short clip attached to a memory, carried emotional weight that text or images alone could not. The content type was right because it matched the emotional purpose of the product. The API choice followed from that, and the revenue model followed from the API choice. Each decision built on the one before it because the first decision was grounded in user need rather than founder preference.

Music also becomes the right answer when a founder can demonstrate, through user research rather than assumption, that their target users already use music in the context the app is designed for. Not "people like music" but "people in this specific situation use music in this specific way, and our product serves that situation better than what they currently use."

• The emotional state at the point of use matches what music produces
• Research confirms users reach for music in that context already
• The API or licensing route available supports the experience without adding friction
• The cost structure is workable at realistic user volumes, not only at scale

Conclusion

Music as a content vertical is a conclusion that should follow from understanding the emotional job your product is doing, the user evidence that confirms music serves that job, and the technical and commercial realities of building with licensed content. Starting with music because it is a popular category, or because the founder loves music, is how products end up expensive to build, difficult to price, and misaligned with the people they were meant to serve.

The decisions compound quickly. API choice shapes user friction. User friction shapes adoption. Adoption shapes whether the pricing model is viable. And all of it sits downstream of the first question, which is what emotional state your users are in when they open your app and whether music serves that state better than anything else. Get that question right and the rest of the product has a foundation. Skip it and the feature list, the licensing agreements, and the subscription tiers are all built on assumption.

If you are at the point where the music decision is still live, that is the right time to work through it. Not after the API integration is scoped, and not after the licensing negotiation has started. Now, before those commitments are made. Let's talk through your entertainment app brief and work out whether music is the answer your users need or the one your instincts reached for first.

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