Spotify has finally launched in South Africa, with many music consumers excited about the Swedish company finally trading in South Africa. You could always access Spotify, even though it wasn’t legal. Now the streaming service is available for free download on Android and iPhones.

South Africa already has tons of streaming services to choose from, such as Deezer, Apple Music, Google Play Music etc. Though Spotify is seen as the Mecca of streaming services with about 71 million paying subscribers over 61 countries and about 156 million subscribers in total. Spotify does offer a free tier and a Premium tier for R60 p/m.

Now how does the service benefit South African artists? According to the Recording Industry of South Africa (RISA), the South African music industry loses about R500 million a year on internet piracy alone. So possibly the addition of Spotify could possibly help decrease those figures, though it’s hard to see it happening solely based on the fact that South Africa already has tons of streaming services.

Streaming services have always been very benefiting for independent artists worldwide as this allows them to distribute their music easier as opposed to the old-fashioned way of signing to a label or having a distribution deal just to get your music out there. Of course artists that are under labels still benefit from having their music on the service as well but the benefits aren’t as high as they are for an independent artist. There is no real “average” monetary benefit artists get from having their music on Spotify as it all depends on the various stakeholders involved in the artists music. These take shape in the form of labels, publishers, songwriters, composers and how well the artist does.

It’s still a bit difficult to gauge the full influence that Spotify will have in the South African market solely based on it’s infancy. It will be very interesting to see if it will become a game changer in how South Africans consume music and also benefit the artists that make use of it’s facilities.