How Much Does It Cost To Build An App Like Songkick?

Introduction

Songkick is a widely popular event discovery and ticketing platform that allows users to track their favorite artists, find upcoming concerts, and purchase tickets all in one place. With the rise of live entertainment post-pandemic, apps like Songkick have seen tremendous demand. To develop a similar app, businesses must consider many factors like platform integration, real-time notifications, and geolocation tracking—all essential to providing users with the best event discovery experience.

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What makes Songkick unique is its ability to gather data about local events, concerts, and live shows, syncing up with users' preferences based on their favorite bands, venues, or locations. The cost of building such an app is influenced by factors like real-time event updates , cross-platform compatibility, and integration with third-party ticketing services. But a live event app goes beyond just delivering content—it’s about scaling infrastructure, sending notifications in real-time, and managing security and compliance for secure ticket purchases.

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Building an app like Songkick comes with its challenges—from satisfying user preferences for intuitive interfaces to meeting industry-specific regulations for payment processing and content distribution. This article outlines the key areas that affect the app development cost, helping you understand the depth of development efforts required for a successful event-discovery platform.

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Platform and Device Compatibility

When building an app like Songkick, platform compatibility is a priority that will heavily influence your development costs. Users consume event content primarily on mobile but may check scheduled events or book tickets from desktops or tablets.

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iOS and Android Development

According to U.S. statistics, both iOS and Android are vital platforms for a successful Songkick-like app. iOS users tend to spend more on live events and are generally early adopters of technology, making them an essential target audience. Android offers broader market coverage, especially when launching beyond U.S. borders, but Android development tends to require more time due to the fragmentation of devices and operating systems. Each OS version must be compatible with feature sets like push notifications, real-time syncing, and ticket reminders, ensuring reliability across devices.

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Developing natively for iOS and Android will likely increase your app development cost but yields greater reach in the U.S. Taking time to optimize UI and performance for both platforms can ensure user satisfaction.

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Cross-Platform Development

If your goal is to minimize costs while deploying to both operating systems, cross-platform tools like React Native or Flutter may be a suitable option. They allow developers to code once and deploy on both iOS and Android simultaneously. However, the complexity of adding real-time synchronization or geolocation features necessary for an event-tracking app could require additional native code modifications. Be mindful that this approach, while cost-saving, could hinder certain aspects of native performance when it comes to event refresh rates and map interactions.

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Desktop and Web App Compatibility

Aside from mobile, desktop versions may also be necessary for users who prefer checking concert schedules on larger screens. Having a well-designed web app or a dedicated desktop app allows event organizers or users to manage their event schedules from desktops. This additional complexity will increase development timelines and costs, but it’s important to deliver a consistent cross-device user experience (UX).

Design and User Experience (UX/UI)

A seamless user experience (UX) and aesthetically engaging user interface (UI) are critical in retaining users, especially in a high-stakes event-based app like Songkick where time-sensitive decisions (e.g., ticket sales, booking a concert) often rely on intuitive design.

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Clean and Intuitive Design

U.S. users prioritize smooth, fast designs that are easy to navigate. Event discovery should be intuitive, with a well-structured layout that helps users find upcoming events or concerts quickly. The concert feed, artist details, and ticket purchase process should all be laid out in a logical and easy-to-navigate manner to avoid frustration.

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Personalized Interface and Customization

For a social-driven event app like Songkick, users love customization. Building engagement involves allowing users to personalize their feed or user interface—whether that means customizing alerts based on artist followers or customizing the design, such as light/dark modes. Personalization adds value but increases design costs, as the app must cater to broad user preferences.

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Dynamic Visualization

Given that discovering concerts involves real-time information and dynamic updates, U.S. users expect to see seamless transitions, fluid scrolling, and data that adjusts in real-time without overwhelming them. Extra design attention is needed to adjust the UX flow based on user preferences for location-based services or targeted artist recommendations.

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High-quality design elevates user retention but requires a team of skilled UX designers familiar with mobile-first experiences, driving up development costs.

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Integrations with Third-Party Services or External Systems

The ability for your Songkick-like app to integrate with external systems is a significant factor in the overall app development cost.

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Event Ticketing and Vendor APIs

At the core of Songkick’s success is its partnership with ticket vendors like Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, and StubHub for direct ticket sales through the app. Building these systems means integrating APIs that can handle real-time updates on ticket availability, seat selection, and pricing, as well as secure payments for tickets.

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Streaming Platform Syncing (Spotify, Apple Music)

For user-tailored recommendations, you might want to sync with Spotify or Apple Music to pull user listening data and create personalized concert recommendations. This offers higher engagement for users who follow artists—and the more relevant the concert recommendation, the more likely they’ll purchase tickets. Syncing APIs for music or streaming platforms will, however, require meticulous testing and fine-tuning while increasing integration complexity.

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Payment Processing Systems

Seamless purchasing of tickets often involves integrating payment gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, or even Google Pay. Due to the sensitive handling of payment data, payment gateways must meet PCI-DSS compliance standards to secure credit card information. These compliance measures add extra costs from both a development and compliance standpoint.

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Other third-party API integrations could involve adding map integrations or location-based services like geofencing (Google Maps API) to alert users about nearby events—further influencing development costs.

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Database & Back-End Infrastructure

A solid back-end infrastructure is critical for real-time data management, supporting a system where events, tickets, and user data must be managed dynamically.

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Real-Time Event Data Processing

Your backend architecture must continuously update concert information, ticket availability, and pricing in real time. Opting for a distributed cloud infrastructure (like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure) ensures scalability when facing particularly high loads, like when tickets for a major event go on sale.

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Immediate syncing between user preferences and dynamically suggested events must be flawless and fast. Real-time data syncing requires a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure minimal latency, regardless of where users are located across the U.S. Storing and retrieving user data related to interests, suggestions, and events falls on the back-end infrastructure.

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User Data & Preferences Storage

In today’s privacy-first era, ensuring that user data—particularly personal preferences regarding concert choices, ticket purchase histories, and even credit card information—are securely stored requires an infrastructure focused on data security compliance adhering to U.S. data laws like CCPA or Europe’s GDPR regulations.

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Investing in scalable, secure architecture that can support both user growth, data privacy, and real-time processing comes at an elevated cost but ensures your app can scale seamlessly.

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Ongoing Maintenance and Updates

Maintaining an app like Songkick requires continual monitoring and bug fixes, implementing new features, and ensuring ongoing compatibility with event timelines, tickets, and location changes.

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New Features and Upgrades

As you continue to gather user feedback in the U.S. market, your app will need feature updates to remain competitive. Whether adding features like social discovery, pushing real-time alerts, or expanding event partner integrations, you’ll need to invest in ongoing custom app development.

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Security Patches and Compliance

Security is especially crucial given that users entrust your app with sensitive payment information and personal data. Regular security updates ensure you remain compliant with U.S. data protection laws and safeguard against potential breaches. This requires budget allocations for security audits, bug fixes, and performance testing.

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Team Expertise and Location

Building an app like Songkick requires a highly skilled development and design team familiar with handling both real-time data and building scalable architectures to support multimedia and ticketing modules.

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U.S.-Based Development Teams

U.S.-based developers are well-versed in local regulatory requirements, such as CCPA compliance, but come at a premium, with hourly rates between $150-$250 per hour. The advantage is faster communication, an intuitive understanding of U.S. regulations, and better alignment with business goals.

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Offshore Development Teams

For those looking to cut costs, offshore development teams in regions like Eastern Europe or South Asia offer quality development services at significantly lower rates ($30-$80 per hour). However, managing offshore projects often comes with challenges such as language barriers, time zone differences, and familiarity with local compliance laws.

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Combining an offshore development approach with U.S.-based project management can help balance costs while maintaining quality.

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Read about Onshore vs Offshore Outsourcing.

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Hidden Costs & Miscellaneous Factors

1. QA & Testing Requirements

Testing the app across real-time interactions, geolocation services, and ticket booking modules is highly complex, and doing so on different platforms (iOS, Android) with various edge cases, such as low network zones, requires dedicated quality assurance (QA) testing efforts.

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2. App Store Fees and Guidelines

Both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store charge developer fees and take a percentage from in-app purchases or subscriptions (ranging up to 30%). Once deployed, any subsequent updates, such as bug fixes, pricing adjustments, or content updates, must pass through the app store review, requiring additional development costs for maintenance.

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3. Legal and Compliance Costs

In the U.S., collecting personal event-tracking data and financial information means adhering to strict compliance regulations under CCPA and even COPPA if minors are anticipated users of the platform. Consultations with legal experts to ensure compliance—and potential audits—drive up costs but are necessary to avoid heavy fines and legal disputes down the road.

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What Makes This App Category Unique in Terms of Development?

Building a Songkick-like event-discovery app is unique because it sits at the intersection of real-time data syncing, ticket purchasing, and social discoverability. Concert and event apps rely heavily on providing up-to-the-minute data, such as available seats, pricing changes, or event cancellations. Real-time notifications, robust content delivery, and fully integrated ticketing purchase systems also play crucial roles.

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The U.S. market’s demand for real-time updates, localized content suggestions, and accelerated mobile experiences requires building an app that is not only attractive but scales seamlessly.

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Moreover, integrating with diverse ticket data sources, providing dynamic personalized event feeds, and supporting seamless ticket transactions adds technical complexity, requiring expertise in both AI-powered recommendations and real-time media syncing.

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Want to see your custom event-discovery app idea brought to life?‍

At Scrums.com, we specialize in developing robust, real-time social apps just like Songkick. Get started today and contact us for a custom app development estimate—let’s turn your vision into reality!