App Store Keywords for Music Apps: Tuners, Players and Streaming Compared

Cells: estimated volume / estimated difficulty on a 0-100 scale. The phrases are English in every storefront, so DE, JP, FR and BR show English demand.

Two oddities stand out. "Piano" is harder in Japan (61) than in Great Britain (45) or Germany (35), and Japan's volume score for it (70) is the second highest on the row after the US. And the metronome row is cheap almost everywhere outside the US: difficulty 13 to 22 in five of six storefronts.

The 63% separator share is the third highest we recorded, behind News and Productivity. It means most top-10 names are built as "brand plus descriptor", so the descriptor half of the name is where a phrase like "metronome" tends to appear. That is an observation about how the visible apps are named, and it cannot tell you whether the descriptor causes the ranking.

• If your product is a practical tool (tuner, metronome, practice aid), start with those phrases. Their difficulty is moderate even in the US (57 for "guitar tuner", 45 for "metronome") and far lower elsewhere, so a name or subtitle that states the function has a realistic chance to be heard. See prioritising keywords by volume and difficulty.
• If your product competes on catalogue, expect "music streaming" and "music player" to be head terms dominated by apps with tens of thousands of ratings. Treat them as brand-adjacent targets and spend your keyword bytes on narrower descriptions.
• Do not assume small storefronts are empty. Japan's Music volume average is 51.8, not far from the 54.5 in Great Britain, so a Japanese listing may deserve real attention. Sizing it with English phrases only shows English demand; research the Japanese terms separately, as in translate or transcreate keywords.
• Because the subtitle shares ranking text with the name, read subtitle keyword strategy before you decide which half of a descriptor goes where.

Neighbouring categories show different shapes: Entertainment has a similar exact-title share, Social Networking is far harder, and Utilities holds many single-purpose tools like the ones above.

Six generic English phrases per category, 36 queries per category through the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25, fetched 2026-11-01), top-10 results analysed. The mapping from phrase to category is approximate: only 68.6% of US results had the intended primary genre across all categories. Read more in the methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV.

LocalASO is a Mac app that runs the same rating-count estimates for any keyword in 52 storefronts, each in its local language. It is a $29 one-time purchase; the download is free but the app needs a license key. See pricing.