South Africa’s music industry could do with some innovation. Heck, the global scene is begging for it. Ever since the digital revolution, a mixture of piracy and the prominence of iTunes, Spotify and perhaps Amazon, crops of talented artists are struggling to make ends meet. One initiative that’s looking to change this is SkyRoomLive — a live performance streaming site from South Africa, which has been showing some really impressive growth recently.
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In partnership with Virgin Mobile South Africa, SkyRoomLive claims to be the country’s biggest live music streaming portal. The site showcases live music performances that are filmed in HD and 3D which are then broadcasted onto social networks and its site.
To give you an idea of its size, during August SkyRoomLive used approximately 34.6 terabytes of data to enjoy local and international live performances which roughly equals 588 200 hours of music or 8 600 movies. Founder of SkyRoomLove Eban Olivier notes that its user base has grown tenfold within the last year:
Looking at our latest streaming stats I’d like to think that Johannesburg based users have earned the unofficial title of ‘SA’s biggest music streamers’ as they seem to account for 58% of the total global data usage recorded on SkyRoomLive in recent months. Trailing behind Joburg’s music hub are Cape Town and Polokwane, consuming approximately 26% and 12% of the data usage respectively.
It’s furthermore achieved over 2 million live and archived views over one year alone, with an average of 600 000 Facebook impressions per week.
Interestingly, additional SkyRoomLive usage stats show that South Africans are using Chrome, Opera Mini and Safari as their preferred browsers when live streaming these events, with the most popular device being the Blackberry Curve 9320, iPhone and iPad.
“In terms of actual music content, Urban and Hip Hop are by far the most streamed music events for South Africa. This is mainly due to international influences as well as natural demographics and local interests,” continues Eban.
According to IROCKE’s 2014 world rankings for Online Content Providers, SkyRoomLive is currently ranked number 12 in the world under the likes of American Express Unstaged, Red Bull Studios, Livestream and Boiler Room.
The company is certainly onto something. Amazon’s recent acquisition of the live gaming streaming site, Twitch, is reaffirming the prediction that this trend is taking off as suggested by KPCB’s in-depth report earlier this year.
