Playfre expands to 13 more African countries 

Before this extension of service, music streaming on Playfre was limited to Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa. This move brings the countries currently served by Playfre to 18.

Chika Nwaogu, Playfre co-founder and CEO, said the company is looking forward to connecting the “countries where there are demands for a service like Playfre. We intend to serve the African continent for now before expanding to include countries outside the continent.”

Playfre was launched in May 2019 and has a library of over 50 million songs and 2 million artists. It has so far amassed over 7 000 registered users and over 1.5 million streams.

In August, Boomplay Music, a leading Chinese music streaming and download service in Africa and Playfre’s rival claimed to have more than 53 million users, up from 42 million in April this year. Boomplay also said that 80% of its catalogue is African music, which accounts for 75% of its streams.

However, unlike Boomplay’s whose service is currently limited to Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria and Ghana, Playfre music is freely available to anyone who downloads the app and with no ads.

“Spotify and many other big music streaming platforms have not yet opened their doors to most African countries because of the weak intellectual property laws in these parts of the world, thus making these awesome apps unavailable to the African demographic. Those who have opened their doors to us, still charge monthly to stream unlimited music,” Nwaogu said.

“We have been developing what will become Africa’s first real answer to Spotify. We at Playfre are trying to bring the over 50 million songs on Spotify to you at no charge, with the same Spotify experience and guess what? We did it.”

In July, Playfre launched a music monetizing platform called SongRoute. The service was meant to help African artists make money off their music from popular music sites, including Playfre itself, Spotify, Amazon, Google Play, Deezer, and iTunes.

The features in SongRoute include Global Music Distribution, YouTube Monetisation, Playlist Pitching, iTunes Carousel Pitching, Marketing, and Piracy Protection.

Playfre is available for download here.