Nokia is making a big play for the streaming music market in South Africa, undercutting rivals by introducing its new Nokia Music+ service at just R25/month.
TechCentral revealed in January that Nokia would bring Nokia Music+ to South African users. The service offers more about 15m songs for a monthly subscription fee in Europe and the US of €3,99/month and US$3,99/month respectively.
Nokia Music+ is effectively an upgrade to the free Mix Radio service the company launched last year. Unlike Mix Radio, which will continue to be available free of charge to users of Nokia’s Lumia devices, Nokia Music+ will offer unlimited song skips and track downloads.
“Nokia Music+ provides increased control over the listening experience at a cost noticeably lower than many third-party services,” the company says in a statement.
The service gives users the ability to download unlimited mixes for offline playback; the option to select higher-quality audio when connecting via Wi-Fi; lyric streaming for many tracks; listening via PCs and tablets.
Nokia Music+ is available for people to try free for seven days.
The launch of the service ups the competitive pressure in a market that has seen the launch of Germany’s Simfy, France’s Deezer and the UK’s Rara.com in the past year.
Microsoft, meanwhile, had been expected to launch Xbox Music in South Africa by the end of last year but by the time of writing in early April had still not launched the service. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
