A musicians' bridge to dignity

Homegrown tech is giving artists the power to own, protect and profit from their work

- Lesego Chepape

There's something deeply spiritual about the way sound travels through the South African landscape.

You hear it in the hum of taxi radios, the spontaneous harmonies at train stations, the Sunday gospel flooding township streets.

Ours is a country where music isn't background noise, it's testimony. It tells of struggle, joy, survival and, above all, resilience.

But somewhere between the studio and the spotlight, too many South African artists get lost. Their dreams are muted by exploitative contracts, drowned by lack of access and discarded by a system that often doesn't care who makes the music, only who profits from it.

That's the world Sbusiso Jaca saw — and it shook him.

"I started off as a music producer," he recalls. "Working with upcoming artists around KwaZulu-Natal — mostly independent ones.

"What I saw was painful."

Painful, not because of a lack of talent — there's no shortage of that. The pain came from watching brilliant young creatives with no money for music videos, no marketing budget, sometimes not even the R300 needed to distribute their music online.

In a country with soaring unemployment, this was more than a career issue. It was an economic crisis. "Even when artists do get signed," Jaca explains, "they walk away with just 10% or 15% of what their music earns."

That is not a deal. That is dispossession.

From this frustration, Jaca did what many South Africans do best: he innovated. He built Tuneroyalty, a homegrown tech platform that allows independent artists to upload their songs, maintain control of their rights and invite their fans to invest in their careers.

"We needed something built for us, by us," he says. "Americans and Europeans have platforms tailored to their music industries. We didn't. So we built one."