Ten of the 22 music apps we swept are running an App Store ad that Apple can no longer put a date on, because it started before the published one-year window, and nine of those ten were still recorded on 26 July 2026. The longest-lived advertiser in the category is not a lessons app. Soundcorset, published by SUNG HO LEE, has run over a year in all 25 EU storefronts on two creatives and one headline, and the headline is the brand name.
We pulled every App Store ad these apps ran across all 25 EU storefronts from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires. The repository reports 22,101 records for the 22 apps. We retrieved and analyzed 11,022 of them, grouped into 253 distinct creatives, with zero failed country queries across 29 entity sweeps. Only eight language tags appear anywhere in those 11,022 records: en-GB, de-DE, fr-FR, it, es-ES, pt-PT, nl and sv.
The survivor board
Publisher names are exactly as Apple returns them. "Longest still running" is the creative with the longest span whose last recorded impression falls in the final week of the window, which ends 26 July 2026.
| Advertiser | Publisher (Apple) | Records | Creatives | Storefronts | Longest still-running headline | Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simply Piano | Simply Ltd | 3,861 | 14 | 18 | "Piano Songs & Lessons", 17 markets | at least 272 |
| tonestro | fun.music IT GmbH | 3,299 | 12 | 25 | "Learn to play an instrument", 25 markets | over a year |
| Ultimate Guitar | Ultimate Guitar | 3,276 | 7 | 25 | "Learn and play favorite songs", 25 markets | at least 311 |
| MuseScore | MuseScore BVBA | 2,957 | 24 | 25 | "Tab for piano, guitar & so on", 22 markets | at least 120 |
| Soundcorset Tuner & Metronome | SUNG HO LEE | 1,475 | 2 | 25 | "Soundcorset", 25 markets | over a year |
| Moises | Moises Systems, Inc | 1,235 | 16 | 25 | "Gesang/Instrumente entfernen", 2 markets | at least 284 |
| Yousician | Yousician Ltd | 1,181 | 14 | 12 | "Guitar, Bass & Singing Lessons", 11 markets | over a year |
| Chordify | Chordify BV | 1,098 | 14 | 9 | "Play Guitar, Piano and Ukulele", 9 markets | at least 347 |
| flowkey | flowkey GmbH | 816 | 10 | 11 | "Piano songs and lessons", 6 markets | over a year |
| Simply Guitar | Simply Ltd | 657 | 12 | 17 | "Gitarrenkurse und Songs", 2 markets | over a year |
| Tuner Pro | MWM | 423 | 21 | 24 | "Simmen Sie Ihre Gitarre Bass", 2 markets | over a year |
| Piano Simple Piano Recording | Seiji Hashizume | 397 | 4 | 24 | None. Went dark 7 July 2026 | n/a |
| Metronome Tuner X | CONG TY TNHH SKYPAW | 283 | 28 | 25 | "BPM Zähler & Chromatische", 2 markets | 247 |
| Tuner & Metronome Attune | LPaim Tech | 223 | 8 | 25 | None. Went dark 22 April 2026 | n/a |
| GuitarTuna | Yousician Ltd | 169 | 8 | 3 | "Basse Ukulélé Guitare et autre", 1 market | over a year |
| Drum Coach | UPBEAT STUDIO | 169 | 16 | 7 | "Drum Coach: Schlagzeug lernen", 1 market | at least 84 |
| Sheet Music Scanner | App Sub 1 LLC | 150 | 19 | 15 | "klavier lernen lesen, erkennen", 2 markets | at least 305 |
| Sheet Music Reader Halbestunde | Halbestunde GmbH | 144 | 9 | 4 | "Noten Scanner, Lernen", 2 markets | at least 233 |
| Metronome | Julian Boehm-Tettelbach | 134 | 7 | 17 | "Musik", 2 markets | over a year |
| Ukulele by Yousician | Yousician Ltd | 106 | 4 | 5 | None. Went dark 8 February 2026 | n/a |
| Melodics Drum Lessons | Melodics Limited | 36 | 2 | 1 | "Learn drums and play rhythms", 1 market | over a year |
| Skoove | Learnfield GmbH | 12 | 2 | 1 | "Piano und Keyboard spielen", 1 market | 132 |
"Over a year" is Apple's own marker, not our estimate: the repository reports anything older than the window as over a year rather than as a date. "At least N days" means the span is a floor, and the reason is in the method note at the bottom. Simply Ltd appears twice because Simply Piano and Simply Guitar are separate apps under one publisher.
Five readings of this table.
Four advertisers are most of the category. Simply Piano, tonestro, Ultimate Guitar and MuseScore hold 13,393 of the 22,101 records, just over 60 percent. The bottom of the board is thin: Skoove has 12 records in Germany, Melodics Drum Lessons has 36 in Germany, and both run a single storefront. Neither has meaningful EU App Store ad volume recorded in this window, which is a statement about paid App Store search and nothing else. The same goes for Piano Marvel at 55 records, Playground Sessions at 65 and Musopia at 131.
The second and fourth heaviest advertisers in the category are names most people in it would not list. tonestro, published by fun.music IT GmbH, sits at 3,299 records, more than Yousician, flowkey and Chordify put together. MuseScore sits at 2,957. Neither was on the list of music apps we started with. We found them by searching the repository for category and developer terms rather than for brands we already knew, which is the only way they turn up.
The surviving copy sells the category, not the feature. "Learn to play an instrument". "Learn and play favorite songs". "Piano Songs & Lessons". "Play Guitar, Piano and Ukulele". "Guitar, Bass & Singing Lessons". One advertiser in 22 has a feature claim as its longest-running line, and that is Moises with "Gesang/Instrumente entfernen", remove vocals or instruments. Everything else at the top of the board describes what the app is for in the plainest words available.
Two rivals are running the same sentence, word for word. Simply Piano and flowkey both run "Songs und Kurse am Piano" in Austria and Germany, and both run "Cours et chansons au piano" in France. Simply Piano's German line carries 38 records from 29 May 2026 and is still live. flowkey's German line carries 52 records from 28 September 2025 and is also still live, so flowkey was there first by eight months on German and five on French. Two competitors, one identical headline, both paying for it in the same auction.
The one-year marker and the still-running column have to be read together. Ukulele by Yousician holds a creative past Apple's one-year window and went dark on 8 February 2026. Tuner Pro has 11 separate creatives that have been dark for 76 days or more, including an English line past the one-year marker with 128 records across 17 markets that stopped on 22 February 2026. Age on its own is not proof that something is working now.
The instrument nobody else is bidding on
tonestro's longest-running creative is a single English headline, "Learn to play an instrument", held across all 25 EU storefronts for over a year and 769 records. The headline never changes. What changes is the instrument named in the promotional text underneath, and there are five of them: flute on 128 records, saxophone on 126, trombone on 120, trumpet on 116, clarinet on 86.
Not one of the five is piano or guitar. Every other advertiser near the top of this board leads with piano or guitar in the headline itself. This is a measurement of ad copy in one English template, not of what the app teaches, and tonestro's app covers more instruments than five. What it shows is where the heaviest EU advertiser by storefront coverage is pointing its search spend, and it is pointing away from the two words the rest of the category is fighting over.
Nineteen storefronts get English and nothing else
tonestro and Ultimate Guitar each run in all 25 EU storefronts. Each serves the same 19 of them in English only: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Sweden. Poland alone takes 215 tonestro records and 221 Simply Piano records, all of them English.
There is no Polish, Czech, Greek, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian or Irish tagged copy anywhere in the 11,022 records. Not from anyone in the category.
When localization does arrive, it arrives late and in waves. Simply Piano's English "Piano Songs & Lessons" starts on 26 October 2025 and its first non-English creative, Portuguese, starts on 12 April 2026, a gap of 168 days. MuseScore's gap is 167 days, Chordify's is 122. Ultimate Guitar launched six language variants on one day, 17 September 2025, then ran the same pattern again on 3 February 2026 and 7 April 2026. tonestro localized in two waves nine days apart, France and Portugal on 19 May 2026, then Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain on 29 May 2026.
One live oddity fell out of that: tonestro's Portuguese creative is tagged pt-PT, runs only in the Portugal storefront, uses the correct Portuguese app name and promotional text, and carries the headline "Naucz się grać", which is Polish. Fifteen records, first recorded 19 May 2026, still recorded at the window end. Meanwhile tonestro's Poland storefront returns 215 records and every one of the 50 we could read is English. We can tell you what the field says and no more than that: the copy is Polish, the tag is pt-PT, the storefront is Portugal. The only Polish ad copy in the category is running in the wrong country.
Drum Coach shipped two of the same shape and then fixed both. Its French creative, "Learn Rhythm, Play Drum Beats", was tagged fr-FR with English copy and ran in France from 8 October 2025 to 18 February 2026, 133 days over 36 records. Its Spanish creative, "Praticar beats, tempo e ritmo", is Portuguese, was tagged es-ES and ran in Spain from 8 October 2025 to 20 January 2026, 104 days over 13 records. Both were replaced with correct copy this year and both replacements were live at the window end.
Where the money goes
Almost entirely into App Store search results. Of the 11,022 records we retrieved, 10,799 are search results, 97.98 percent. The product page placement takes 153 records, 1.39 percent, and only three advertisers use it: Ultimate Guitar with 70, Metronome Tuner X with 75, Sheet Music Scanner with 8. The search tab, the browse surface, takes 70 records, 0.64 percent, and exactly one advertiser out of 22 buys it. It is Metronome Tuner X, an app with 283 records in total, and none of the four heaviest advertisers goes near it.
Video is close to absent. Twenty-five of the 253 creatives carry a video asset, just under 10 percent of creatives, but they account for 166 of 11,022 records, 1.5 percent. Three advertisers run any video at all: Sheet Music Scanner on all 131 of its retrieved records, Sheet Music Reader Halbestunde on 23 of its 125, and Skoove on all 12 of its. We checked the big spenders at record level and found zero video records for Simply Piano across 900, zero for Ultimate Guitar across 1,250, and zero for MuseScore across 1,250.
Format splits 7,426 icon plus asset ads against 3,596 icon ads. So the category buys one surface, in one format, with a still image, and competes on a line of text.
How to read this for your own category
Longevity is the cheapest read you can get on a rival's performance, and Apple publishes it for nothing. Nobody keeps paying month after month for a creative that loses money, so an ad still running after a year is an ad that pays. Pull your closest rivals, sort every creative by how long it has run, and write your first lines against the survivors rather than against whatever launched last week.
Three habits this category adds. First, search the repository for what the category sells, not for the brands you already know, or you will miss the second and fourth heaviest advertisers in it. Second, look at the coverage column before the copy column: an app running in 3 storefronts and an app running in 25 are not competing for the same thing, whatever their headlines say. GuitarTuna is a household-scale tuner and runs in exactly three, France, Germany and Spain. Third, check the empty spaces. Nineteen EU storefronts get English only from the leaders here, one advertiser buys the browse tab, and 1.5 percent of records carry video. Every one of those gaps is either a bad idea the category already tested, or a surface nobody has bothered to try in a year.
You can pull any advertiser at recao.app, free, no account, in about a minute.
Method note: figures come from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), swept directly across all 25 EU storefronts with zero failed country queries, data window 26 July 2025 to 26 July 2026. The repository lags real time, so "still running" means recorded at 26 July 2026, not today. We swept 29 entities (22 app entities and 7 developer entities) covering 22 advertiser apps holding 22,101 repository records, retrieved 11,022 of them and grouped those into 253 distinct creatives. A creative is one distinct ad grouped by placement, format, headline and asset count, and its span runs from the earliest first impression to the latest last impression across every market. The floor caveat matters here: Apple returns only about the 50 most recent records per country query, so for any advertiser where we retrieved less than the repository total, older records were never returned and a first-impression date can only move earlier. Thirteen advertisers are capped that way, Simply Piano hardest at 900 of 3,861 records (23 percent) and tonestro next at 1,088 of 3,299 (33 percent), followed by Ultimate Guitar 38 percent, Chordify 41 percent, MuseScore 42 percent, Yousician 50 percent, flowkey 66 percent, Soundcorset 77 percent, GuitarTuna 78 percent, Moises 82 percent, Sheet Music Scanner and Sheet Music Reader 87 percent, and Drum Coach 91 percent. For those advertisers every span in the table is a minimum, never an exact figure. "Over a year" is Apple's own marker for anything older than the window and is likewise a floor, not 365 days. Record counts are repository rows, a proxy for recorded activity, not impressions, installs, reach or euros. Placement percentages are computed over the 11,022 records retrieved, not over the 22,101 repository total. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.