Fiddling with my iPhone the other day I bumped into a cool application that detects information on the song playing on radio or TV including who sang it, when and for which album. OK, so maybe that technology is not so new but still it is fascinating. Now imagine while you chill at home you hear a song playing on the TV but you missed the part where they said who it is. So you activate that application and when you know who it is, and you like it, you interact with the show right then and download the song straight to your phone.
Come on, if you love your music you have wanted both; knowing who is singing a song you are hearing or instantly owning a song after it has been played so you won’t have to rely on chance to hear it ever again. While The Afterparty will not supply you with the song detection application for your phone, the SABC1 show gives you an opportunity to legally download whatever song they play.
“We play requests and most of those are hot videos of songs that are hits now,” said Benny Langa, one of the presenters on the show.
He said the show was the only one in the country taking it further from just playing the music by giving viewers the opportunity to download the audio version of whatever song they play on The Afterparty.
“The viewers see a keyword and a number to SMS every time we play a music video. For the small amount of R5 they get to own the song by downloading it from a legal site.”
You may be thinking this is really nothing out of this world since people have been downloading music off the internet since the beginning of the worldwide web. However, Langa insists that this way is safer as it guarantees good quality music and it is also a legal route.
The beauty of it all is that you don’t have to wait for Langa and his co-presenters to choose what songs you want to see in each show and subsequently download as you can request them. “People tell us what they want to see on the next episode through Twitter @theafterpartySA and Facebook theafterpartySABC.”
About his co-presenters, Sthembiso Legodi, Lebo, Chantalle and Melany, who are all fresh faces in TV, Langa said he loves working with them.
“Man the ladies I present with are so beautiful it can get distracting in there but we are all good friends,” he said.
• Catch The Afterparty at midnight to 5am every day on SABC1.