I remember the moment I realised that music streaming services were the future. I was at the Trans Musicale music festival in Rennes, France, in 2009 and was invited back to some French youngster’s apartment to carry on the party after the day’s festivities.

As we all piled into Julie’s flat, she asked what we wanted to listen to.

“Some Bob Dylan,” I replied. “Where are your CDs?”

With a flash she was online and asked: “Which Bob Dylan album?”

Julie did not own CDs; they were a relic of history to her. Why own music in CD form, or even MP3 form, for that matter, when you can just stream anything you want off the Internet?

I sat there listening to Highway 61 Revisited, wondering how long it would take us to get a service like this in SA with its poor broadband penetration and expensive data costs.

The answer is two-and-a-half years. SA finally has its first music streaming service. Dubbed Simfy Africa, the service has been launched in SA as a partnership between German music streaming service Simfy (pronounced sim-fie, a shortened version of Simplify) and eXactmobile. In Europe it competes with services such as Spotify, Rhapsody and Rdio.

Simfy Africa chief operating officer Gillian Ezra told the Mail & Guardian that Exact Mobile had looked at all the major players, but Simfy stood out because it saw Africa as a future market. The other companies were less enthusiastic.

Also, Simfy Africa was the only service with a BlackBerry app and this was important because BlackBerry is still popular in SA.

So how does it work? For R60/month, you can get an account with Simfy Africa and access to the 18m tracks on its database.

All the major record labels are on board: Sony, Universal, EMI and Warner have all signed up and so have a number of independent label aggregators such as The Orchid and Fine Tunes.

Simfy Africa is actively encouraging local independent labels and all SA artists to sign up, too.

This is going to be a one-stop shop for your music needs, except for those rarest needs, of course.

Protecting intellectual property
 What happens when you are not near an Internet connection? The service allows you to download your favourite tracks or albums to your phone, iPad or laptop and store them for offline listening.

A security wall protects the downloaded tracks so you cannot share them, thus protecting the intellectual property of the artists and labels.

“Even if you can find the downloaded tracks you won’t be able to do anything with them,” said Ezra.

The service launched on 27 August 27. The M&G interviewed Ezra four days before the launch and 2 000 subscribers had already registered for the service.

Every consumer gets a 14-day trial period during which they can use the service before handing over a cent.

Payment is made by credit card, electronic funds transfer or using mobile airtime.

But what about the data costs? All tracks are encoded at 192kbit/s a second, which Simfy Africa says translates to about 85MB for every hour of listening.

Good news all round
Simfy Africa is good news all round. The labels win because the service is bringing consumers who pirate music back into the fold. Why would you illegally copy music when Simfy Africa is legal and a click away for R60/month?

Research done by analyst firm Strategy Analytics suggests that streaming services will bring in £696m for the global music industry in 2012, a year-on-year increase of 40%.

According to ABI Research, 5,9m users will be signed up to music streaming services globally by the end of this year and this figure is projected to be 161m by 2016, an annual compound growth rate of nearly 95%.

The streaming services are also great news for consumers, because everything is a click of a button away and they no longer have to deal with SA’s abysmal physical music retail business, which mostly just caters for popular tastes.

The labels may have deleted certain music from their physical distribution lists, but that does not mean it is not available in digital form and albums that are not on sale can thus be found on Simfy Africa.

New albums would go live on the service immediately, said Ezra, so there will be none of that month-long wait before a new album reaches SA shores.

It is also great news for SA artists because they can load their music on to Simfy and earn royalties from it.

It works on a proportional payment system, so the artists that get listened to the most are paid the most. Musicians can also use the social media aspects of the services — it links to Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm — to market themselves and their music.

The social media components are great for everyone: users can make a playlist on Simfy Africa and share it with friends, whereas artists can network with their fans directly by looking at who is listening to their music, befriending them and then creating a direct marketing link. Labels can also use these services to market their artists.