So, I was reading a TechCrunch article about a new product named The Drop. Then I had to stop reading at the place where the writer asks “Does anyone download music still?”
What a stupid question, of course, people still download music (I should know, after all we run a download website at OneCrier PLAY), but that is not to say the writer of that article is a moron. He is not.
In the USA and other places where real internet connectivity is readily available and can be taken for granted, people do not bother to download music, they simply stream it.
In Nigeria and several other places across the world, music downloads is still in vogue. Why would I technically download a song 5 times under the guise of streaming when I can download ONCE, play as often as I want and transfer free to my friends. As a general rule: I do not watch videos online, I download them so that I can watch it again and share with people. (Some technical insight: any time you stream something online, you are actually downloading it. Its just that it is not saved permanently on your device)
So, easy internet access in the USA kills off music downloads, lack of it in Nigeria means music downloads is still in vogue.
Different strokes for different folks.
The lesson we can learn: This is the danger of seeking advice without applying context. Context is everything.
Disaster is when a Nigerian reads that article and then decides music download is dead and hence starts working on a streaming platform, probably will not work. Despite all the millions of dollars invested, the streaming business in Nigeria cannot certainly be said to be a hit with everyday people yet.
Internet access is still very expensive and quite slow in these parts. I am still stalling over a 1.3Gb download that will update my android device to the latest version. The device will have to stop working before I will force myself to cough out the data, to my colleague in the USA, 1.3Gb is not a big deal and if I try to explain to him that it might take me 12 hours to complete the download, he cannot relate.
This is one of the reasons that despite the fact that some people read a lot of books, they still just cannot seem to apply things read in their everyday life. The principles they read about seem rather inapplicable to their own environment.
We have to develop a filter to wade through all the advice we receive and then select the ones that can be truly helpful to us.
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Watching The World
- Read about Yitang Zhang, a part-time calculus teacher who recently solved a theorem that has stumped mathematicians for more than a century: The Pursuit of Beauty
