Music App revenue really “rocked” out in 2013 – more and more of us are using their smartphone as their new music player – who needs an iPod any longer? Users are buying headphones, ear buds, or Bluetooth speakers and using their smartphone as their personal music player, to listen privately or to share through a speaker. As you can see from the above graph, music app revenues increased from 2012, a whopping 77-percent in 2013. This large increase is in no small part due to the enormous success of Pandora in the United States.
The top ten apps responsible for the music revenues are, for the most part, music streaming apps, designed to let the user listen to music all day, with a variety of genres and capabilities, such as designing playlists – some allow you to pick particular songs, others are only by category, and some are commercial free if you pay a small monthly charge. Social media seems to be growing each year and 2013 was no different, as families and friends find ways to reconnect or keep in touch with each other. Kids want to send pictures of themselves to their friends and parents, especially if they are away at school. Parents like to send photos to the Grandparents and some older folks are getting a smartphone so they can pass pictures of the Grandchildren around to their groups of friends. Social media apps with a photo or video presence grew dramatically in 2013 as app downloads were up 55-percent over 2012, as evidenced by the graph above. The top five apps by Social Platform were Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Vine, and Line Camera and also listed are the top five Editing apps, which are becoming more popular as many users like to slightly tweak their photos or change them around entirely, before posting them on the internet.
Another area that showed growth was in the Banking and Financial segment as more people would rather bank by phone than go into a brick and mortar building. Younger people just do not want to be bothered and live via their ATM/Debit card and check balances on their smartphones. The Baby Boomers are happy to bank with their computer or smartphone, while the older population does not trust those new fangled devices and prefer a face-to-face meeting with an actual bank teller. With the convenience of direct deposit, being able to deposit funds via your smartphone and camera, and even paying bills on your banking app, there is really very few reasons to go into an actual bank today. The increase in banking and financial apps has jumped up 55-percent in just one year, and as more banks and institutions adopt mobile banking, we should continue to see this jump higher.
The listing in the gallery below shows the number one and two apps in three categories – In Banking Apps, Chase as number one is not surprising considering their size and Wells Fargo is second. For making payments, the number one App is PayPal, again, not a surprise, although as more and more banks adopt ways of paying other people through their own app, we may see a bank name in there someday soon. Please let us know on our Google+ Page what are your favorite apps and if you are trending with the majority of people. App Annie data and products are the industry standard, used by over 90 percent of the Top 100 grossing publishers. More than 350,000 apps rely daily on App Annie Analytics to track their downloads, revenues, rankings and reviews. The company is tracking the most downloads and revenues of any app or eBook store market data company to date, at over 33 billion downloads and more than US $8 billion in app store revenues.
Source/Graphs: appannie.com