US iPhone Owners’ Music Spending Grew by 22% Last Year

Mobile-analytics firm Sensor Tower is publishing a new report this week that quantifies app-spending in 2018 by iPhone owners in the US. The headline is that this spending increased by 36% year-on-year to $79 per iPhone owner, on average. This is money spent on downloading paid apps as well as in-app purchases (subscriptions included). Unsurprisingly, mobile games took a big share of this spending: $44 of the $79 average-spending per iPhone, which was up 22% year-on-year. But we’re more interested in the ‘Music’ category of apps, which saw average spending grow by 22% to $5 – remember, this is split between all iPhone owners in the US: clearly those spending money on music-streaming apps and other kinds of music apps were laying out more than $5 a year. TechCrunch notes that this is partly about the push towards more in-app subscriptions, actively driven by Apple. That said, 2018 was also the year when Spotify, for one, ditched iOS in-app purchases as a subscription method for its new users.

Source: Music Ally