Durban - South Africans have been enjoying the benefits of electronic books for some time now, but we’ve lagged behind the rest of the world when it comes to getting our music streamed to us over the web.
Sure, tech-savvy locals have been tapping into internet music services such as Spotify and Pandora for years, but they’ve had to resort to geeky, not-quite-legal chicanery to mask their location.
Now, at last, South Africans have their own, fully-fledged, legal streaming music service, Simfy Africa, and, by all accounts, it’s proving hugely popular since its launch at the end of August.
Germany-based Simfy, available for some time in Austria, Belgium and Switzerland, comes to SA courtesy of a partnership with eXactmobile, the mobile content company that’s made a mint selling ringtones and wallpapers to local cellphone owners.
The service offers an impressive catalogue of more than 300 000 artists and 18 million tracks, with a small but respectable percentage comprising SA artists, thanks no doubt to Primedia-owned eXactmobile’s strong relationships with local record labels.
At the moment it’s available on PCs and Macs, iPod Touch and iPhone devices, as well as on Android and BlackBerry smartphones, with an iPad app coming soon and talk of support for Windows mobile and Symbian handsets down the line.
I’ve been testing it out since its launch and I’ve been pretty impressed.
The biggest drawcard is access to a near limitless choice of music without having to clutter up your living room with CDs or your hard drive with downloads, all for the fixed monthly fee of R60 – although you can save R100 if you sign up for a 12-month plan.
Hear a song on the radio you like? Simply type the name of the song or artist into the search field in Simfy and within seconds you’ll be playing the song, provided it’s in the Simfy catalogue and you have an internet connection.
Of course, this is SA, so that last proviso, web connectivity, is a big one.
If you’re going to mainly stream your music over a cellular network, you’ll want to make sure you have a good-quality 3G connection and a generous data plan – Simfy uses around 85MB for every hour of streamed music – if you want to avoid a nasty shock when your next cellphone bill arrives.
BlackBerry owners should be aware that you can’t stream Simfy’s music over BIS, although the company is in talks with BlackBerry over this.
Similar considerations apply to streaming your music over an ADSL connection.
Fellow tech journalist Steve Whitford did the sums and worked out that if you stream nine hours of music a month, you’ll use about 3GB of data, so make sure your account can cope with that.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got the slowest ADSL connection in SA – allegedly 385 Kbps, but more often than not, half that – and I can report that bu-u-uff-f-f-f-er-r-r-ing is a constant irritation when streaming Simfy at home. This should improve when Telkom gets around to upgrading my line to 1 Mbps, supposedly by the end of the month.
The good news for Simfy customers with less than optimal cellular or ADSL connections is that you can download as many of your favourite tracks for offline listening as will fit into your device’s memory.
Be aware, though, that once you stop paying your monthly subs, all those tracks will transform into unplayable digital ballast.
Apart from a pretty clunky interface, both on desktop and mobile, there’s little else to complain about.
Until iTunes opens its music store for business here or a competing streaming music service arrives, Simfy is really the only game in town and it deserves kudos, and our support, for recognising SA as a huge, untapped market, rather than the digital backwater all too many others seem to regard us as. - Sunday Tribune
For links to Simfy’s local website visit Geekbeard.posterous.com
Any questions or comments? Tweet me @alanqcooper.