BestNgoma Is Dead
CORRECTION: Bernard Kioko has contacted us and confirmed that BestNgoma’s content has simply been shifted to the bernsoft.com website. The domain for BestNgoma.com has expired and they will not be using it any more.
Bestngoma.com, the website created by Bernsoft for the purpose of selling Kenyan music, is no more. When you go to BestNgoma.com now, all you get is a placeholder page with some generic ads. That is what happens for after a website has expired. The demise of BestNgoma comes despite a huge effort by its rich parent company Bernsoft in collaboration with Safaricom to sell Kenyan music for the low, low price of 5 bob.
Safaricom helped out shortly after website launched by sending a lot of SMS advertisements to their subscribers with the link to Bestngoma.com. They also made it such that you could see an ad for Bestngoma.com whenever you topped up your credit. BestNgoma was also one of the first links on Safaricom’s highly trafficked “Safaricom Live” portal. Despite all this, they died. I had once talked with the owner of the website, Bernard Kioko, during an event. He confessed to me that the 50% cut that Safaricom would take for providing the payment service was something that made BestNgoma hard to run as a business.
It seems that the business of selling Kenyan music is an extremely tough one that nobody seems to have cracked in the online market. I tend to agree with DJ Pinye, who was once quoted as saying that it is very hard to sell music to the young generation, who are aware of all sorts of ways to get the downloads for free via internet or file exchanging. PewaHewa.com is another online music retailer that seems to be struggling. Looking at their homepage, the songs have not been updated in ages.
