Spotify is a leader when it comes to music streaming across the globe closely edging towards the 200 million user mark but it has pulled this off without a presence in any African country. South Africa has been the luckiest on the list where the service has launched.
The country already has the likes of Apple Music, Google Play Music and Deezer as much of Africa but Spotify has been absent not until now.
The service launched with a 30 days free trial of the premium service after which it reverts to the Ad supported freemium model or users have to part with R60 to keep the service going.
Spotify has followed the footsteps of the competition and will price the service at R59.99 or an equivalent of UGX 18,000 per month for the premium service.
South Africans join over 179 million Spotify users across the globe with 70 million of those paying. Spotify also chose to launch their first because of increased connectivity options and wide spread use of cards, two elements one would consider as not widespread on the continent. The South African service will stream at 24kbps by default to address the data issue and will stream faster in case users find faster networks like wifi.
While South African will no longer require VPNs to use the service in order to escape the Not Available in Your Country disclaimers, the rest of Africa will have to wait before Spotify sets sail to their countries.
However, judging by the South African pricing which majority of other streaming services employ elsewhere on the continent, it will be an affordable service but we also hope they could adopt mobile payments like Mobile Money as they journey up the continent especially in the East where such services are widely spread.
