There's gold in them hills

South Africans don't need reminding that when it comes to digital media, we are often left in the dark. A most prevalent example of this is digital music, where a new era of all-you-can-eat subscription services like Rhapsody and Spotify have left us behind. In fact, we haven't even caught up with the previous trend in digital music purchasing. But things are changing. Slowly.

People are quick to blame legislation, regulation and the major record labels for inhibiting the flow of digital music to South Africa. This isn't always fair. My personal opinion is that the legislation is ridiculous, that record labels are yet to fully acknowledge their new place in the world, and that most measures designed to curb piracy have the opposite effect. But that isn't why, for example, iTunes isn't available in SA.

Companies that want to sell music in SA are fully enabled to do so. Our legislation may be restrictive, but it isn't much worse than the UK, for example. Our local royalty organisation, SAMRO, is open to new digital outlets and there is nothing stopping an Apple or Spotify from providing music to South Africans.

The challenge is that you can't do global licensing agreements for music. You have to broker separate agreements for each territory, with local royalty agencies collecting revenue. It's a big job to set up shop in a new country - but absolutely nothing stopping you from doing so in SA. That said, the international digital media companies will obviously chase the bigger markets first.

Nokia is a great example of a digital music provider that has taken the effort to license content for SA. The Nokia Music Store is fully enabled in SA, and the full catalogue is available to locals who want to buy music.

With the Lumia smartphone range available in SA, Nokia has now also launched its Mix Radio service that makes streaming music available legally and without having to lie about location.

This is like a glass of water to South Africans stuck in a desert, where Rhapsody, Pandora, MOG, Rdio and Spotify aren't officially available. Sure, you can lie about where you live and use proxy servers to dupe the system - but why should you have to?

The irony - and in fact cheek - of the situation is that even once you've duped the system and paid for a service, you're still using it “illegally”, because you are accessing content that is not licensed for your region.

One of my resolutions for 2012 is to only support services that are available in SA. I'm tired of jumping through hoops to use services that clearly don't want my money. If you don't think it's worth doing business in SA, then you don't deserve money from South Africans.

The reason iTunes Music Store is not available in SA is because Apple has not considered our market worth setting up in, until now. Likewise, Spotify has chosen to launch in the more lucrative territories of Europe and the USA first - SA isn't considered big enough, so we sit on the backseat.

And that's okay. I have no delusions about the size of our market. But I will assert that we are bigger than they realise.

A study of South African middle-class households between 1998 and 2006, undertaken by Statistics South Africa, in conjunction with University of Michigan, in the USA, determined that 26% of households could be classified as having a bourgeois standard of living.

This means in 2006, we had 12.6 million middle-class South Africans - which is more people than the entire population of Sweden, where Spotify launched. Even if only half of middle-class SA fell in the addressable market for such a service, you'd still be a moron to overlook it.

Nokia knows this. And I hope they make a ton of money in SA, where they are the only game in town.

At this point, my critics will raise issues surrounding broadband proliferation and the definition of middle-class in the South African context. So let's pretend they have a point and reduce the potential market of a music streaming service to three million. Even then, it's still more significant than some central European countries where services like iTunes have been available for years.

The real reason we don't have these services is simple. The companies providing them don't understand our market. Those who have taken the trouble to investigate it - like Nokia - have found that there's gold in the hills.

There have been local attempts at online music retailing, but they're too embarrassing to even mention. They provided unnecessarily oversized files in ridiculous formats, with restrictive digital rights management served on badly designed Web sites. They sold individual tracks for twice the price they were going for on iTunes. And then they blamed the market when they failed.

The world has moved on anyway. Buying individual tracks or albums is so five years ago. What you want now is a subscription service like Spotify. You pay $10 - around R80 - per month for the right to access almost every song ever recorded, with the ability to download them for listening to on aeroplanes and stuff.

Once you've tried a service like Mog, which I use when travelling in the USA, you can't go back. It's awesome. Returning to your iTunes library or CD rack feels like stepping out of a luxury sedan into an ox-wagon - quaint and novel, but ultimately painful and boring.

So hopefully one of these services wakes up and smells the Mzansi gold soon. Until then, Nokia deserves your cash.