Highlife is older than every platform this article is going to mention, including the ones that no longer exist. It’s worth starting there, because the “free MP3 blog” era people my age remember didn’t invent a demand for downloadable music — it inherited one that was already close to a century old. Source: Sandister Tei, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. ...
Open a tech blog based in San Francisco or London and the word “download” barely shows up anymore. Everything is a stream: music, video, even software updates arrive in the background while you sleep. That framing is accurate for maybe a third of the world’s internet users. It is not accurate for a lot of Nigeria, and it is not accurate for most of Sub-Saharan Africa. I want to lay out why, with actual numbers instead of the usual “data is expensive in Africa” shorthand — because that shorthand is now only half true, and the half that’s wrong is the interesting part. ...