AMAPIANO IS NOT A TREND DECK

The audience arrived before the industry did. Roughly 62% of the genre's streams now come from outside South Africa, and almost none of the campaigns built on the back of that were made with anyone from there.

That gap is the entire problem, and it isn't a moral one first. It's a competence one. A sound that developed in specific rooms, in specific towns, over about a decade, cannot be reverse-engineered from a mood board in a meeting in London. What gets made instead is a costume: the log drum used as a stinger, the dance borrowed without the dancer, a voiceover in an accent nobody involved has.

It reads as fake because it is, and the audience that made the genre valuable is precisely the audience best equipped to spot it. They are not confused about who made what.

A genre is not a look you borrow for a campaign.

The second problem is timing. By the time a sound reaches a trend deck it has been commercially available for two or three years. Whatever advantage existed is gone. You are paying premium rates to arrive late at something that is already being parodied at home.

We are not arguing that non-South African brands should stay out. We're an Irish company; we'd be arguing ourselves out of a job. We're arguing that the money should follow the work. If a campaign uses the sound, people who make the sound should be on the invoice — as producers, directors, dancers, stylists, not as a licence fee paid to a catalogue.

That costs more than a library track. It also produces something that survives contact with the audience, which is the only measure that has ever mattered.

The test we use internally is simple. If the finished film were shown in Soweto to the people it borrows from, would anyone be embarrassed? If yes, we haven't finished. If nobody in the room can answer because nobody in the room is from there, that's the actual finding.