SPOTIFY IS COMING TO SOUTH AFRICA THIS MONTH

There have been rumours that the world's largest streaming music service, Spotify, would launch in South Africa "any day now" for, well, about two years. We are convinced we will see the service before the end of March. Why? there are some journalists in South Africa that have been invited to an event on 13 March, stating that "Spotify has some news to share."

There is no question South African consumers are eager for the service. But, you might ask now, why Spotify instead of Apple Music, Deezer or other streaming services already available in South Africa? Spotify is the biggest player in the game. The company has over 159 million users in 61 different markets and, of those, an impressive 71 million pay for access to Spotify Premium, the paid version of the service that does not include advertisements and allows for offline downloads on three devices.

Spotify is well known for its excellent recommendation engine, which suggests two weekly recommendations, Monday’s “Discover Weekly” of songs the service believes you might enjoy based on other music you’ve listened to, and Friday’s “Release Radar” that offers recommendations from recent releases added to the platform.

Obviously, we don’t have any details on the pricing yet, or details on free trials, but we expect pricing to be in line with existing services (around R70/month) and that there’ll be some sort of trial window for the curious to test the proverbial waters.