China’s Maison leads round for music streaming app Boomplay

Boomplay is a unit of China's Transsnet Music Entertainment Group, a joint venture between smart phone maker Transsion Holdings and IT giant Netease. The fresh capital will be used to increase the number of songs on offer, improve service quality, and recruit talent, according to a statement.

Transsion launched Boomplay in Nigeria in 2015 as a pre-installed smart phone music player. It now has 42 million users, who can access 5 million songs via apps designed for IOS, Android and Windows systems. Licensing partnerships have been signed with Universal Music Group and Warner Music.

Boomplay currently covers Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania and aims to become the largest music streaming service provider in Africa. Revenues mainly come from advertisements and charging users fees for downloading the songs. It is free to stream music.

“As the last untapped emerging market that has over one billion population, a large part of which are youngsters, Africa has huge potential for music streaming services, which is still at its infancy in African countries compared to the US and European nations,” said Xin Li, a managing director at Maison.

Africa is home to 460 million internet users, compared with 800 million in China. The continent is expected to add another 300 million internet users within the next five years.

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• Topics
• Early-stage
• Technology
• Africa
• TMT
• Maison Capital