According to a recent report, Spotify is talking with Vodacom Group about a partnership that would herald its incursion into Africa. The Bloomberg report states that Vodacom, a unit of Vodafone Group Plc, plans to offer its wireless customers subscriptions that include a limited amount of free data to access Spotify’s music library.
The report records that “in a market with below-average broadband speeds, South Africans spent 90 million rand ($8.4 million) on digital music in 2012, about 7.3 percent of the country’s recorded-music market, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.” While the figure is set to rise to 132 million rand by 2017, or 14 percent of the market, that’s still a fraction of what Americans and western Europeans pay to download songs.
Vodacom has 31.5 million customers in South Africa. Spotify, the world’s biggest music-subscription service, has 10 million paying users while a further 30 million listen for free through ad-supported services on computers.
Well Spotify will have to contend with the likes of Deezer, Simfy, Rdio, Spinlet who have been in the african market.
Will they consider the Nigerian market next?
