Songa Music music streaming platform by Safaricom

It is predicted that the global music streaming market will grow at a CAGR of 14% during 2017-2021, bolstered by mobile advertising. According to the 

latest report, the global music streaming market is seeing a positive growth largely due to new features being provided by streaming services, including free access to songs at low subscription fees.  Africa in general excluding South Africa has been left behind when it comes to access to the global mobile music streaming platforms like Spotify, Deezer and Tidal. Just like many early adopters, audiophiles and exposed Kenyans, I have been able to experience the pleasure of mobile music streaming from Spotify, Jango and Deezer as advert free and paid consumer.

 

Safaricom, Kenya’s leading mobile telecommunication company out of the fear of missing out has recently launched is music streaming application that can only be downloaded from google play. Unlike other global applications, Songa looks and smells more like a marketing application considering that Kenyans are not known to pay for content and also given the application’s limited functionality. Not known is known about Kenya’s music industry as a majority of the consumer’s listen to West African, Tanzanian, Hip-Hop and Dancehall with a few notable local artist like Sauti-sol (boy band group that has lost its creativity mojo), Nashinski (the best thing to happen to Kenya’s music industry) Kaligraph Johns, and other copycats.

Upon downloading, one gets a 14-day trial period and just like other fishy applications, it seeks to have access to your location, pictures, manage your phone calls, send and receive SMS, which as you might guess is all about location optimized marketing. I tested Songa version 1.0.8 (143), I selected, Zilizopendwa(East African oldies), Bango, Benga and Lingala but when it came to artist selection, I was only provided with Bongo artist and an unknown artist of whom I couldn’t tell the genre he represented. Sadly, the service is only limited to Safaricom subscribers, both Post-paid and Pre-paid and to make matters worse, it is only available on Android platform. The app has over 2.5 million songs with a variety of genres, including local and international music. Streaming subscriptions are as follows: Daily – Ksh.25, Weekly – Ksh.150 Monthly – Ksh.499. Payment is only via airtime billing. Meaning, when you buy a subscription, Songa Bundle or Purchase your song, the respective amount will be deducted from your airtime.

Just like Deezer, Tidal and Spotify, Songa users are able to download and listen to their music offline. There’s Live Radio, including KISS FM, East FM, Classic 105, Homeboyz Radio and many more.

 My Take.

Ø  The application could serve as the best initiative of digitizing Kenyan music and maybe at some point restore Benga as Kenyan genre, I hope that this will improve given that they source content from Africori who have a worldwide distribution network.

Ø  Safaricom will have to come up with ingenious ways of attracting a wide range of listeners including the launching of an IOS app and also an online platform.

Ø  The application still a lot of bugs and needs to be polished as it crashes every now and then.

Ø  The classification of music genres is mixed for example Navio is put under Genge genre

Ø  Spotify offers over 30 million songs and TIDAL boasts 48.5 million. Of course, this only matters if your favorite musician or group is missing. Both services connect to various home audio sources wired or wirelessly while Songa has a mere 2.5 songs only on android mobile devices and on only on Safaricom network.