We’ve written about Smule regularly: the US-based music apps firm specialises in getting fans to sing (or play virtual instruments to) an array of popular songs, including doing it together using its social tools. Now its CEO Jeff Smith has given some new stats on how popular Smule’s suite of apps – Sing! Karaoke, Guitar, Magic Piano and Auto Rap – are.
Its users are performing 10m songs a day using the apps, with 350,000 people now paying for the company’s ‘all access’ pass, which costs $2.99 a week, $7.99 a month or $39.99 a year. That helped Smule pull in $40m of revenues in 2014, which should mean around $57m of actual spending within the apps, before app store owners’ cut. As TechCrunch notes, Smule doesn’t need to pay for master recordings, but it does pay for the actual songs – one of the examples of music apps that are more lucrative for publishers and their songwriters than for labels and their artists.
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