Live audio intelligence network
Hear what venues are playing.
Open Audio drops a small device on-site that listens for 5 seconds every 30, 60 or 180 seconds, recognises the track, and streams it to one calm dashboard. No login on the wall. No subscription on the bar.
Needletime is not just for Radio & TV anymore.
The problem
A $2.9 billion industry still running on guesswork.
Billions in music royalties are paid out every year using guesswork. Venues pay blanket licensing fees based on their size — not the music they actually play. Artists like Black Coffee, Cassper, and Beyoncé get paid based on radio estimates, not live airtime. Open Audio changes that.
Live audio intelligence network
Statistics that are useful.
Now Playing
Track, artist, timestamp for every venue on the network.
Music Intelligence Leaderboard
Most played artists and tracks — by venue, city, or event.
Active Devices
Fleet health, uptime, and last check-in per device.
Top Track per Venue
What's actually landing on the floor tonight.
System Alerts
Offline devices, silent rooms, recognition failures.
Geo & Venue Audio Intelligence
Map of every listening point, live.
The licensing gap
Clubs, restaurants, malls and events — all licensed, none measured.
Two separate organisations (SAMRO and SAMPRA) are owed royalties, and both distribute on guesswork.
Artists + labels
Recording artists receive needletime royalties via SAMPRA; composers receive performing rights via SAMRO. Neither receives accurate venue-level play data. A DJ playing Black Coffee tracks all night at a Cape Town club generates zero attribution for that specific play — royalties are estimated from radio, not from the venue.
SAMRO + SAMPRA
Rights organisations distribute royalties using radio airplay as a proxy for live venue play. This is an estimate, not a measurement — and it is legally and commercially fragile.
Venues
Venues pay R10,000–R15,000+ annually in blanket music licences based on size and ticket sales — with no connection to the artists whose music actually fills the room. No audit trail, growing legal risk.
The rights landscape
One device. One installation. Two rights orgs, verified.
SAMRO
Administers performing rights for composers, songwriters, and publishers. Collected R683.8M in licence fees in 2024. Distributed R429M in royalties. R284.9M sits undistributed because plays cannot be matched to artists.
SAMPRA
Administers needletime / neighbouring rights for recording artists and record labels. Licenses clubs, restaurants, pubs, and live events — separate from SAMRO. Laid criminal charges against restaurant group Life & Brand in 2024 for non-payment.
Open Audio
One device. One installation. Verified play data delivered to both SAMRO and SAMPRA simultaneously. Structured by venue, event, DJ, and time — queryable in real time. Venues gain compliance protection. Artists gain fair pay.
How it works
Capture. Identify. Report.
Line-in and ambient AGC.
Every device carries both a 3.5mm line-in for direct DJ-mixer taps and a beamforming MEMS pair for ambient rooms. Clips upload to the cloud over Wi-Fi at 30s, 60s or 3min intervals.
Fingerprint every clip.
Audio fingerprinting matches each capture against a global music database. Track title, artist, label, timestamp, venue, and DJ are all logged per play.
Live dashboard, verified logs.
Identified tracks upload to our Supabase cloud backend. Rights orgs and venue operators access a live dashboard with verified, tamper-proof play logs.
Hardware
One device. Every input.
A single unit — ambient AGC mic and 3.5mm line-in on every device. Same backend, same audit-grade play data.
Clubs, live events & studios
Taps directly into the DJ mixer via 3.5mm, RCA, or Neutrik combo XLR. Passive pass-through — zero audio interruption. Captures the pristine source signal for forensic-grade play logs.
- Input
- 3.5mm / RCA / XLR
- Connectivity
- Wi-Fi
Restaurants, bars & hotels
Two MEMS microphones in a beamforming pair listen to ambient venue audio with no signal-chain access. Wall-mount and forget. Built for restaurants, bars, malls, and hotel lobbies.
- Input
- Beamforming MEMS pair
- Connectivity
- Wi-Fi
Shared: ESP32-WROVER MCU · 4MB PSRAM · plug-in 5V power · Modal / Supabase backend.
Competitive landscape
No direct competitor. Only isolated adjacencies.
Detection only
Identify tracks — no venue integration, no rights reporting, no hardware.
Rights reporting only
Aggregate broadcast data — no live venue capture or hardware.
Broadcast monitoring
Monitor radio and TV — no live venue capability or hardware.
Open Audio
Live venue audio capture, real-time fingerprinting, rights-org reporting, in one product.
Ready to listen?
Register your venue or get in touch — we'll ship a device.