Most algorithms on the internet utilise a snowball effect and the objective is to discern the user’s taste, find out what keeps them online, and use that learning to suggest content that connects. The result is, the more you watch or engage specific content, the more you stream a particular genre of music, the deeper down that the rabbit hole you will encouraged to go, through suggestions of similar content. For African creatives this has the potential to create an explosion in the world’s thirst for Africa’s creativity, Africanising, and localising taste in content and data. We can think of African content as a giant, largely untapped spring of fresh content - Afrobeats, Gqom, Amapiano, African music festivals, African films, Afrofuturism, make up artistry, animation and television, comedians and satirists, poets, spoken word artists and so much more. Platforms like Spotify, TikTok, Facebook, Twitch, Piinterest, netflix, Google Arts and Culture, Instagram and all the other internet platforms have begun to draw their content from this fre reservoir and internet users across the globe are sampling it...and finding that they like it, a lot. The world has acquired a taste for African content, and the more you watch, more, will be sent your way.

This digital era has initiated Pan African hubs for digital content experiences like the Badilisha Poetry X Change- the first and largest digital archive of pan-African poetry in the world, South Africa’s National Arts Festival virtual presented a new way to experience theatre and the Zamani project includes 3D models of African heritage sites, the Virtual Freedom Trail project details Tanzania’s liberation struggle and many more digital art experiences are on the horizon. New media forms like Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are also changing the landscape of African creativity and in response traditional legal systems like copyright have been presented with new questions to answer.

Seemingly, tech and the internet have presented what could be the final key to unlocking the potential of Africa’s creativity - democratization. Distribution was traditionally a barrier to entry and that barrier to entry has been lowered, making a continent wide audience, as well as a global audience accessible to far more creatives and cultural practitioners than ever before. With just a cellphone and access to the internet, everyone is able to showcase their creativity.

The first phase has been this new consumption pattern of African content through accessible and affordable distribution platforms, and the next phase is increasingly equitable engagement. TAfrica’s content creators have the chance to be competitive on a global scale, and it is important that participation in this new market should be on their own terms. In a world where data is the new gold, data which captures attention - new, imaginative, underrepresented creative content, takes up space on the internet. Through art and entertainment online, the world is being reintroduced to African people, African landscapes, African languages, African history. The ability of the Internet to correct misperceptions about Africa and its peoples identity and experiences should not be wasted.

If tech has always had the potential to be the next frontier for Africas creative and cultural industries, a time when people spend their time indoors and on screens and devices, has proved that African content, when given equal space to shine, can thrive.This new unprecedented experience of African content at this scale, has been accelerated by the global Covid 19 pandemic. In December 2020, California state senator Ben Allen described artists as 'The Second Responders' in this pandemic. "The medical community saves our lives and the artists save our souls". In a world where the outside became dangerous, society gained access to these second responders through tech, through their screens and devices, presenting motivation for governments across the world to address the specific needs of artists in this digital age.

The internet and tech remain inadequately regulated. This new frontier has presented a new frontier for regulators and policy development, in which the regulators play catch up. The development of technology, and innovations around how data and content on the internet is being created, used and consumed, has exposed the difficulty of regulating the internet, and consequently, regulating this new online market for creativity.

As entertainment and creative work finds its home online, and in what is known as Big Tech - the major technology giants - a continent moving towards the African Union’s Agenda 2063 has seen fit to increasingly coordinate regulation. Aspiration 5 of Agenda 2063 aspires towards An Africa with a strong cultural identity, common heritage, shared values and ethics.

Pan-Africanism and the common history, destiny, identity, heritage, respect for religious diversity and consciousness of African people’s and her diaspora’s will be entrenched. For a relatively liberated continent, this begets policy discussions centered on Geopolitics, decolonisation, neocolonialism and cultural imperialism, as African governments and civil society grapple with creative and cultural content as data, bolstering global platforms for market dominance both in Africa, and the rest of the world.

Creativity online has transitioned policy makers into an era in which creativity is regulated by conversations centered on tech policy topics like digital sovereignty,, localisation, local content regulations and quotas, content classification guidelines, internet governance, internet shutdowns, knowledge and information freedom, development of digital skills, privacy, cyber security and online safety and equitable and authentic representation. Creative Industry policy is now tech policy.

Africa’s creative and cultural industry now needs to be read into policy which governs the information and communications technology (ICT). Regionally, arts and culture has to be integrated into policy initiatives like the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa, African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) and the Digital Single Market for Africa (DSM) as well as other regional policies regulating the necessary infrastructure to participate in ICT, both as users and as business people, innovators and creators.

Most significant of these regulatory developments sweeping across Africa’s creative and cultural economy, is the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020-2030), which provides many avenues for tech companies reliant on African creative content, to align with regional imperatives. The Digital Transformation Strategy aims to unleash the African spirit of enterprise and creativity,

There are a myriad of ways in which tech and the internet have changed the ways in which Africans create, distribute and monetize content.Tech has presented artists with an income in a continent grappling with widespread unemployment, particularly amongst the youth. The presence of tech companies has accelerated access to global markets and the repositioning of Africa’s creative and cultural identity internationally. Akin to any gold rush, this in turn has accellerated ICT infrastructure development and attracted resources for the creation of content In the attention economy, lowering data costs through zero rated and free to stream platforms. These are all developments, fuelled by the creative content online, and directly aligned to the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa.