Buddie Beatz Is Econet’s Spotify, But For Local Jams

If you were downloading local artists jams without paying for anything all along because you didn’t have a place to buy the music, your excuse is no longer valid….

Whilst touring some exhibitors stands at ZITF this afternoon, we passed by Econet’s stand and I personally bumped into Buddie Beatz for the first time. Apparently, it came out two weeks ago so this article is kinda late.

Anyway, Buddie Beatz is a subscription service that allows you to stream african music over the internet. The application has a number of local artists and whilst some popular guys like Soul Jah Love are not on the application, they can always be added later on.

So, how much do you pay?

At the time of writing, Buddie Beatz has 3 packages:

Daily – $0.50. This includes a 50 MB data valid for the one day.
Weekly – $2.00. This includes a 200 MB data for seven days.
Monthly – $5.00. This includes a 600 MB data for thirty days.

Once you’ve subscribed you can also save some of the music for online playing and you’ve some standard music streaming features such as categorisation of tracks.

The app has already gotten a 1000 downloads on the Android Play Store and it will be interesting to see how they improve it going forward and ultimately what this means for local musicians who haven’t been able to get a reliable and modern channel to monetize their content (apart from live shows). The pricing seems fair but we will also follow up on how the revenue is split with the artists on these platforms.