Kenya’s biggest telco Safaricom, apparently is launching a stand alone music streaming service, allowing musicians to upload a great amount of their creative work to the service while also allowing its subscribers to listen to it. At a cost of course but mostly likely, these users data will be zero rated to attract not just numbers but make them part of the experience.
Away from Kenya
Okay, let us come back to reality in the land. Here, there is no such a thing as a streaming app from any of the telcos. Caller tunes is what is being fronted while streaming has been left to the likes of YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer among others. These are big guns and competing with them can take a great deal of effort but they all lack a thing or two that might play to the local players advantage, local content!
With the exception of YouTube, the rest haven’t focused so much on the local industry but Google’s video service has infamously been labelled a data hog. How about a zero rated music streaming service with a local ingredient from a local giant?
It’s so absurd looking for local talent on these services only for the search to return blank results.
Either the industry as a whole hasn’t built enabler synergies for this or artistes themselves haven’t yet embraced the future but the future is slowly catching up them sooner than later.
Caller tunes were a hit. What about a streaming Service?
When telcos fronted caller tunes, artistes followed suit and most likely if they get past the paperwork and legalities involves, artistes could follow their lead this time around given monies are involved for their royalties.
Music downloading is gradually becoming a thing of the past while streaming from the cloud is slowly gaining ground lost by the former.
We now have phone cameras that shoot in 4K, add that not only to photos and video but large apps and files that renders the 16GB, 64GBs and 128GBs of storage a little nothing than an accommodation of the the aforementioned files. If you’re to add local files like music to the equation, your further strain the default storage that comes with most of these gizmos.
Give Ugandans an option to listen to music with unlimited storage in the cloud, slowly, the uptake will rival music downloads since there is an option of saving on storage.
You can also include a few value additional services just to get everyone hooked. Like a place to call home and then telcos can capitalization on that while trying to offer value to their subscribers.
How will subscribers to this service pay? Of course Mobile money and cards for those that use them. Artistes on the other hand could reap rewards from streams instead of letting the pirates reap the rewards off their work.
