While many content creators dream of having their own personalized audio app, this option is often out of reach. That’s because developing an original app from scratch can be difficult, costly, and time-consuming – not to mention the ongoing effort required to update and maintain it.

What if we told you there’s a better way? On the Soundwise Platinum tier, our engineering team will create and host a white-label audio app on your behalf. This method is significantly more convenient, affordable, and easier than creating an app on your own from scratch.

1. Better brand awareness & recognition

Your white-label app will bear your branding. You choose the app name, theme color, icon, launch screen, and description. Together, this means that your app will be consistent with your brand.

Having a consistent brand builds credibility, establishes your brand identity, and helps set expectations. This builds on past successes, meaning people familiar with your brand, will be far more likely to convert as they know what to expect. One survey found an average of 33% increased revenue from companies who ensured their brand was consistently maintained.

Your brand, not ours, is what appears on the storefront of the Play Store and the App Store. This means that your brand is directly accessible to the millions of people who use the Google and Apple app stores. This is a fantastic way of expanding your reach. 

Andrew Johnson, a meditation teacher with over 15 million downloads and streams of his meditation programs turned to Soundwise to avoid investing a lot of money in bespoke apps. Check out Andrew’s apps in the Apple and Google Play stores.

2. Affordability 

Our Platinum tier is a vastly more affordable option than hiring your own developer. A complex app that involves features such as audio streaming, user accounts, payment management, and data security can cost over $100,000. And that’s just the start.

Managing a development team can generate massive costs for your app, especially when you don’t have a software engineering background. And simple miscommunications, small errors, and delays can waste thousands of dollars and set your app back weeks if not months.

Even if development goes smoothly and remains within budget, you have maintenance fees to consider. These average between 15-20% of the development cost.  This is not an optional step; releasing an app without maintenance support could result in significant audience loss and customer support headaches, as missing features, bugs, and user experience improvements go unaddressed.

A white-label app with Soundwise Platinum gives you the same results as having a custom-app, but at a fraction of the cost. You will never have to worry about unexpected fees, as development, maintenance, and updates are all covered within the Platinum subscription.

3. Improved audience retention 

The Soundwise app creates an intimate listening experience, as no other publishers’ content is shared unless the user actively searches for them. The white-label app takes this a step further by only allowing your content on the app.

Listeners can still search for content in the same way as on the Soundwise app, but only your soundcasts will be shown in the results.

You can also provide soundcasts that are automatically added to the users’ library. Providing free audio in this manner is a perfect way to give new users a sample of the rest of your content.

By enabling these free soundcasts, as soon as a listener registers for the app, they are automatically added to your email list. This is a critical step to the success of your app. Welcome emails typically have the highest open rate, with one study finding an open rate of 50-60%. 

You can also send in-app messages to subscribers, just like when a listener subscribes to your soundcast on the Soundwise app. Combined with a welcome email, this has shown increases in audience retention up to 130%.

4. Regular product updates and feature innovation 

You’ll have the added benefit of receiving continual updates, support, and maintenance, as our engineering team continues to improve the Soundwise app experience. If your users have a technical issue, or a bug is found, our customer support team and engineering team are on hand to resolve it.

Not only do you not need to spend time and money maintaining your app, but you also have access to new features and updates at the same time as the Soundwise app. We receive feedback from thousands of publishers and their listeners regularly, which we use to implement features and improvements benefiting both publishers and their listeners. Your white-label app receives all these updates, which means your audience’s user experience continues to improve without you having to lift a finger.

5. Increased conversion rates

A white-label app with Soundwise Platinum also gives you the option to enable in-app purchases. Although this is not an obligatory step, in-app purchases can be a fantastic way to boost sales by reducing sign- up friction.

In-app purchases create an easier listener sign-up flow. Simply put, the fewer steps a user has to take, the more likely they are to make a purchase. With in-app purchases, your listeners can purchase your audio within the app itself with just a couple of taps. 

There’s never been a better time to take advantage of this feature – starting 2021, Apple reduced their in-app purchase fee for small vendors from 30 to 15 percent.

It’s worth noting that enabling in-app purchase is an optional add-on on the Soundwise Platinum plan. If you already have an established web sign-up funnel that is working well, you can skip in-app purchases (saving the cost involved) and simply use your white-label app for audio content delivery. But if the in-app purchase makes sense for your business model, rest assured that it’s easy to make it happen with Soundwise Platinum. 

FAQs 

Can you add additional features to the app at my request?

Only the features that are available on the current version of the Soundwise app will be available to the white-label apps. However, there are certain features that you can disable on the app. These include, for example showing/hiding subscriber and listener counts for a soundcast, allowing/disallowing likes and comments, enabling ratings, and showing publication dates. And if you have a great idea for a new feature on Soundwise, please do let us know!

What happens to my apps if I stop subscribing to the Platinum plan?

If your Platinum plan subscription expires, data loading on the apps will stop, i.e. listeners will no longer be able to access your content on the app. (The apps won’t be automatically delisted from the stores. You will need to manually delist them.)

However, your existing listeners will still be able to access your soundcasts on the Soundwise app with the same account. You simply need to let your listeners know to switch to the Soundwise app and it would be a seamless transition.

Can I enroll listeners through my website and then give them access to the app?

Absolutely. You can connect the software you use to register listeners on your website to your soundcasts via Zapier. When someone signs up for a soundcast on your site, their email address will be granted access.

If the person doesn’t have an account on your app, when they open the app and register for an account with that email address, the soundcast will be automatically loaded into their account. If they already have an existing account on your app, then the new purchase will show up on the app when they open the app and sign in.

Note that this is a user account managed by us. It’s not connected to any account the user may have on your website, though they use the same email address.

You can choose to automatically send a welcome email to the listener when they enroll on your website, to tell them how to download the app and get access to their purchase. You can also set it up in your system to give users instructions for downloading your app and accessing the content.

Note that the granting of access to the soundcast they enrolled in does not depend on the person opening the welcome email from us. The email merely serves as a notification.

What do I do if I find a bug on the app or if a listener reports a technical issue?

Please report the problem to ​support@mysoundwise.com.​ If it’s an issue reported by a listener, please forward their email to us, so that we can reach out directly to them and ask for more details, since most issues are isolated events happening on individual devices and we’ll likely need to communicate with the device owner themselves to sort out the problem for them.