Opera Mini Users Now Enjoy Free Music Streaming

Opera has been carving out as the jack of all trades in the browser world. From offering crypto wallets to file sharing, the browser has been diversifying and offering much more than the ability to open pages.

The most recent addition to Opera’s suite of services is the integration of music streaming in the Opera Mini browser. Introduced towards the back end of 2019, streaming inside the browser works because of a partnership between Opera and Mdundo.

Mdundo is a Kenyan music streaming service that fights “to make music accessible to everyone in Africa”. They have a music catalogue with artists from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Ghana, and South Africa and other African countries.

Artist gets their dues from ads if you’re using the free version of Mdundo (which is what is available in Opera).

The streaming experience is kind of strange but makes sense in Opera Mini. For me at least, songs were downloading then playing back instead of the “play over the internet and stop playing if the internet connection is removed” nature of streaming sites such as Boomplay and Spotify.

Whilst this is different from most conventional streaming apps it makes sense because Opera Mini has always been about saving data so if you download a song you don’t have to use up your data the next time you want to play it.

The one downside of Mdundo and Opera Mini’s arrangement is that once you’ve downloaded the song in the browser it appears in your music player: which means you don’t have to use the browser and you avoid ads this way.

Anyway, the interesting partnership makes me wonder what Opera will bring next to their browsing experience which has become quite unorthodox over the past few years due to the addition of new services within the browser:

By adding Mdundo’s music catalogue to Opera Mini we are bringing this experience to our browser. This means that every time you decide to stream or download a song with Opera Mini, you will also be supporting your favorite artists so they can keep producing the music that you love the most.
Opera Blog