Business
Who Will Succeed in the Crowded Field of Africa’s Online and Mobile Music Platforms?
Each country is seeing the launch of its own platforms with francophone and lusophone African countries trailing slightly behind the trend.
However, both the local and the bigger music platforms are looking to start operating in more than one country. Sune Mushendwa’s Mkito.com started last year with the ambition of reaching a million users in 12 months.
Recently he announced that he would roll-out the platform to other African countries, concentrating on local music in each case but adding a certain amount of catalog from elsewhere in each case: the balance is currently 90 percent from Tanzania and 10 percent from Kenya.
As a company with its headquarters in Singapore, Spice operates as a value-added service (VAS) aggregator and digital content company with a particular specialism in music. It launched its music service Mziiki last July targeting East Africa.
It is now in the process of rolling out across Africa, starting with Southern Africa.
Unusually, it will also soon go into offering video alongside music, something that not many of these new platforms have done. One exception is Jason Njoku’s iROKO TV which has its own music platform iROKONG alongside its film and TV offering.
There are two business models which include: advertising generated revenue model and the subscription based model or user pays.
A lot of these services start free and get a lot of traffic but the major advertisers – with the exception of the mobile operators – have been slow to come to the party. It is a shame because effectively paying for young Africans to be able to listen to music (and listen to advertisements) would be an effective way of building brand loyalty and market share.
Payment is tough because the mobile operators have yet to realize that tomorrow’s world will require a friction-less payment channel for which they will get only a small part of the income but more data revenue.
