Ayoba revamps music app

The Ayoba music homepage now has an improved design, enhanced player as well as optimised artist and playlist imagery. The revamped app also offers options to add voice and video calling to the platform’s offering.

To access all the features, users should upgrade their apps to version 0.42.2 on the Ayoba website. 

“It has been an incredible journey building a music service in Ayoba,” the company’s CEO Burak Akinci said. “The year started at 40 000 monthly music users and we are currently at 300 000 monthly music users. The top territories are South Africa, Nigeria and Cameroon and we expect this growth trend to continue. The new music homepage in Ayoba will further enhance music discovery in the app, and we anticipate a favourable response from users”.

Simfy Africa, in partnership with MTN, also announced the closure of its standalone music streaming service MusicTime, which had been operating in a number of regions, including South Africa since 2018. The music service will be integrated with Ayoba to offer one messaging and music streaming platform. MusicTime will close to new users this week, while existing subscribers can access the service until 30 November 2021.

“We take this opportunity to thank all our Simfy and MusicTime users for their support,” Akinci said. “It has been 10 years since the Simfy service was launched, and the music industry and competitor landscape has changed significantly. We see greater growth opportunity with the music offering in Ayoba. The upgrade of the music homepage in Ayoba is the first in a series of upgrades that are forthcoming in the app with our heightened music and content focus.”

The Africa and Middle East-facing app offers 20 localised playlists for each market. The popular playlists are updated weekly and include Top Songs and New Music Fridays. Other notable playlists are Gloire à Dieu (Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville), Ziyaduma! (South Africa), Olamide: Birthday Playlist (Nigeria) and Top 50 Songs (Ghana).

Ayoba boasts more than 160 content channels across various categories with over 8 million monthly active users. MTN customers are offered free data to use Ayoba, with the exception of users in Benin. The free data can be used for all the services in the app, including messaging, browsing, gaming and listening to music. However, voice and video calls are excluded from free-data provisions.