Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has teamed up with Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung, among others, to lower the cost of mobile data. The initiative aims to bring internet access to the “next five billion” people.
The group said it wanted to help those in developing countries to become part of the internet community, stating “Potential projects include developing data compression tools, enhancing network capabilities to more efficiently handle data, building systems to cache data efficiently and creating frameworks for apps to reduce data usage.”
What could this potentially mean for the music industry?
Popular Nigerian highlife musician and singer Sunny Neji believes digital music distribution could help fight piracy in his country. More and more Nigerians now go online to get access to music, instead of buying pirated CDs, says Nej in an interview with Samuel Okocha on Techspecie.
Piracy has reduced our industry to a very sorry state. Maybe as the internet gets more popular, as people hook unto it more and go there to look for music, it will be better for us in the long run,
Perhaps more reliable and affordable internet in the developing world will lead to more opportunities for artists and start-ups to monetise their products. However Dr Michael Jennings, chair of African studies at Soas, University of London, tells the BBC that he welcomed Zuckerberg’ss efforts, but that priority must be given to other pressing needs such as providing power to keep devices up and running.
Image via Whiteafrican