Transsion Holdings, the leading smartphone selling company in Africa has done a big deal selling phone brands such Itel, Infinix, and Tecno. Now it is doing even more than that by building Boomplay, a music streaming joint venture with NetEase, a Chinese internet company. NetEase on its own has already built a music streaming service in China that has up to 400 million users.
The launch of the service in 2015 has already seen growth of a base of 31 million users. Out of that number, 17 million are active users from Africa and they log in every month to enjoy that service. Of course, with those numbers, Boomplay is heading towards becoming one of the biggest or most popular music streaming platforms worldwide.
Since 2015, Boomplay has opened offices in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania. The music streaming app is now available to smartphone owners who are not using any of Transsion brands. Since April 2016, it has garnered up to 10 million downloads from Google Play Store.
Users can access the service free see ads as they make use of the service. The paid version eliminates all ads. This premium service not only allows streaming of music, it also helps in downloading songs and videos. Now that Boomplay is growing, competition is starting to grow too but that has not been the case since the beginning. Now, Tidal and Spotify have launched in African markets too, followed by Apple which is finding it most difficult to operate due to payment method issues.
The kinds of songs offered range from Afrobeats and other genres of African music in mix with songs from global acclaimed musicians or international music stars.
Now, Boomplay wants to even play bigger by partnering Universal Music Group. This will be difficult in the face of charging subscribers too low in monthly fees. Of course, charging more does not guarantee more profits for the company. At the present time, Boomplay charges $1.40 per month for a user to satisfy his or her quest on the platform.
