Music, by the numbers

Spotify: Music and Podcasts alone holds 41,858,162 ratings, which is more than its next seven competitors on the leaderboard combined. Across the entire Music category, total ratings add up to 111,138,821 spread over 23,239 tracked apps, so Spotify by itself accounts for more than a third of that whole pool. Pricing tells a different story, though. Of those 23,239 apps, 19,327 are free and 3,908 are paid, an 83.2% to 16.8% split that puts free apps well ahead. But the paid apps that stick around aren't cheap: 940 sit in the $5-9.99 range and 768 ask $10 or more, and both of those groups actually outnumber the 509 apps priced under a dollar.

App count and rating share seem to pull in opposite directions. Townsquare Media, LLC runs 188 apps in Music, more than any other publisher, but those apps carry just 9,907 ratings combined, less than 0.1% of the category total. Cumulus Media isn't far behind on app count with 141 titles, yet it manages only 537 ratings. sheraz Rasheed's 88 apps hold a combined 105 ratings. Even if you add up the top three publishers by app count, they still land under 0.1% of all ratings in Music. Roman Skripchak breaks that pattern: 86 apps and 12,346 ratings, fewer titles than the leaders above but more traction than three of them put together. Flooding the store with apps just isn't the same as building an audience.

People reward the apps they actually open, over and over. Pandora: Music & Podcasts sits at 11,291,890 ratings and Shazam: Find Music & Concerts at 8,803,749, both apps that get opened daily rather than downloaded once and forgotten. Amazon Music: Songs & Podcasts (3,337,139) and Apple Music (3,074,796) trail well behind Spotify but still dwarf anything outside the top eight. The tightest race on the whole board is Apple Music against SiriusXM: Music, Sports & News, separated by only 364 ratings, 3,074,796 to 3,074,432. Daily habit beats novelty every time here.

Quality runs high across this category, and there isn't much bloat dragging it down. The median rating across the 15,379 rated apps is 4.6, with 8,917 apps sitting at 4.5 stars or higher against only 1,524 below 3.0. Median download size is 38.9 MB, and the size figures back that up: 14,879 apps come in under 50 MB, and only 296 run 500 MB or larger. A Music app clearly doesn't need to be heavy to earn a good rating.

Maintenance is more of a mixed bag: 12,243 of the 23,239 tracked apps pushed an update in the last 12 months, which leaves plenty of others sitting untouched. In a category this crowded, standing still is a slow way to disappear.

If you're picking a Music app, publisher name recognition doesn't tell you much: Townsquare Media and Cumulus Media between them run 329 apps and barely register in ratings, so a big catalog under one name says nothing about quality. Rating volume among the leaders matters far more, since Spotify, Pandora, and Shazam earned those numbers through daily use, not marketing spend. If price is a factor, free still dominates at 83.2% of the category, though the paid apps that survive tend to charge $5 and up rather than sell cheap. Go where the ratings already are.