Mziiki (Spice VAS Africa)
Johannesburg-headquartered African music streaming app run by Spice VAS Africa under India's DiGiSPICE group, dormant since about mid-2023.
- Based in
- Johannesburg, South Africa
- Founded
- Mziiki launched mid-2014. Spice VAS Africa established its Johannesburg headquarters in 2012, per TechCentral, 13 November 2014. No incorporation date for the operating entity was obtained.
- Founders
- Not established. Arun Nagar is named in 2014 trade coverage as chief executive of Spice VAS Africa, but no source read by this desk names a founder of the company or of the Mziiki platform, and the earlier founder attribution on this record was not supported by the sources cited for it.
Mziiki was an advertising-supported music and video streaming app and mobile site built around African repertoire, operated by Spice VAS Africa. It launched in mid-2014 with East Africa as its first roll-out phase, and by November 2014 trade coverage reported it running in a dozen other African markets. It reached South Africa in December 2015. The service offered streaming on Android, iOS and BlackBerry alongside a mobile site for feature phones, with offline storage, full-track downloads and the option to set a streamed song as a ringback tone. An ad-free subscription tier was described as in development in 2014.
Ownership sits outside Africa. Spice VAS Africa set up its headquarters in Johannesburg in 2012, but its legal entity, Spice VAS (Africa) Pte. Limited, is incorporated in Singapore, and it appears at entry 13 of the subsidiary schedule in the FY2018-19 annual report of DiGiSPICE Technologies Limited, an Indian company listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, held at 80 per cent within that group. The same filing records a separate South African company, Spice Digital South Africa (Pty) Ltd, which was renamed Ziiki Media SA (Pty) Ltd. Arun Nagar, named in 2014 trade coverage as chief executive of Spice VAS Africa, later led Ziiki Media. The two businesses are therefore related through a shared executive and a documented shareholding, but they are distinct legal entities and this directory carries them separately.
The platform no longer operates. The domain mziiki.com still resolves in DNS, but the apex returns a server error and the www host refuses connections, and the last successful Internet Archive capture of the service dates to June 2023. No dissolution notice has been located for the operating entity, so the record is held as dormant rather than defunct. Mziiki matters as an early attempt to build a mobile-first, licensed African streaming catalogue in the years before the global services moved properly into the continent, and as an example of an African-market music platform run from a holding structure registered outside Africa.