German-based media streaming company Simfy is set to launch a local offering of its music streaming service before the end of the month.

Simfy Africa will have more than 18m tracks available for streaming and has secured licensing deals with all of the big international record labels, including Sony Music, Universal, EMI and Warner Music Group. An average of 500 000 tracks will be added to the service each month.

The service is expected to cost R60/month but interested users will be able to try the service for free for two weeks.

Simfy supports PC, Mac, iOS, Android and BlackBerry, with the mobile applications already available for download. The service includes an offline mode so that users can download an as-yet-unspecified number of songs to their devices so that they can listen to them without an Internet connection. Subscribers can use Simfy on a PC or Mac and up to three mobile devices.

The service is available in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium and was launched in May 2010. The company’s cross-platform client is based on Air, Adobe’s cross-platform runtime environment designed to allow rich Internet applications to run as both desktop apps and on mobile devices.

Simfy, which is a partnership between Simfy in Germany and SA digital content specialist eXactmobile, includes a broad selection of SA music in addition to its international catalogue and promises its catalogue will be updated frequently. Subscribers will be able to pay using their mobile phone account or using prepaid airtime. Payments will also be possible using credit card, direct debit and electronic funds transfer.

To date, SA users have been limited to free services such as Nokia Mix Radio, Grooveshark and Boom.fm and haven’t had the option of subscription streaming services like Spotify or Rhapsody. — (c) 2012 NewsCentral Media