The listening layer for a $2.9 billion industry.

Recording artists in South Africa receive needletime royalties via SAMPRA; composers, songwriters and publishers receive performing rights via SAMRO. Both organisations license venues — clubs, restaurants, pubs, malls, live events — but 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. Black Coffee's royalty share is estimated from radio airplay, not the venue.

SAMRO collected R683.8M in licence fees in 2024 and distributed R429M in royalties. R284.9M sits undistributed because plays cannot be matched to artists. That's not a data problem — it's a measurement problem.

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. In 2024, SAMPRA laid criminal charges against the restaurant group Life & Brand for non-payment. Compliance without measurement is expensive and legally exposed for the venue, and invisible for the artist.

We place a small ESP32 device on-site. Every unit ships with both a 3.5mm / RCA / XLR line-in for direct DJ-mixer taps and a beamforming MEMS ambient mic pair — one device, one installation, either capture path.

• Line-in. Passive pass-through into the DJ mixer with zero audio interruption — pristine source signal for forensic-grade play logs in clubs, live events, and studios.
• Ambient AGC mic. Two MEMS microphones in a beamforming pair listen to ambient venue audio with no signal-chain access. Wall-mount and forget — restaurants, bars, malls, hotel lobbies.

Every 30, 60 or 180 seconds the device records a 5-second clip and uploads it over Wi-Fi to our cloud backend. Audio fingerprinting matches each clip against a global music database. Track title, artist, label, timestamp, venue, and DJ are logged per play. Rights orgs and venue operators access a live dashboard with verified, tamper-proof play logs — structured by venue, event, DJ, and time, queryable in real time.

Compliance protection. An auditable, tamper-proof record of exactly what played, when, and for how long — filed automatically to both SAMRO and SAMPRA. No more "prove what you played" letters. No more estimates of your attendance being used to justify your bill.

Fair pay. If a DJ plays your track at three Cape Town clubs on a Friday night, three verified plays are attributed to you — not distributed across a radio-weighted pool based on last week's Metro FM rotation. Needletime is no longer just for radio and TV.

Measurement, not estimation. Structured, queryable play data delivered directly to SAMRO and SAMPRA in the same feed. The R284.9M sitting undistributed at SAMRO isn't a distribution problem — it's a matching problem, and match data is the only thing that closes it.

Devices are deployed in pilot venues today. The dashboard is live for operators. We're onboarding venues, rights orgs, and label partners in parallel. If you run a venue, represent a rights org, or manage a catalogue — the fastest way to join is to register.