Music lovers in the Middle East and North Africa will soon have access to their favorite music from across the world at their fingertips. Spotify, one of the world’s largest music streaming services announced last week that they are launching operations in the region. The company seemed to have already begun offering services in several MENA countries including Bahrain, Lebanon, Egypt, UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Oman, Qatar, and Algeria.
Up until the early hours of November 4, 2018, the platform was available as invite-only. You could request early access to Spotify music streaming services by visiting the country-specific page for your location and request an invite. There was no guarantee that your request would be approved. And even if it was approved, Spotify did not set any specific timeline within which you were likely to be notified about the status of your request.
However, all the country-specific sites were full of bugs and not working properly. And now, in a new turn of events, the company seems to have taken off all those websites, which indicates that Spotify is not yet quite ready for a full-fledged launch. There was no official update from the company regarding a launch date as of press time.
Spotify is up against MENA’s homegrown streaming service Anghami which has an early mover’s advantage. On the other hand, Spotify is a world-renowned streaming service which is almost sure to have brought along some serious brand-value.