Feastival’s Cabo Women’s Day edition served up a good night of music. What stayed with us was how safe it felt, and in Cape Town that counts for more than it should have to.
A bride arrived blindfolded. Her friends walked her in, pulled it off, and the group was dancing before she had her bearings. That only happens when a crowd feels safe, and safety was the story of Feastival’s Women’s Day edition.
The panic says the machines are winning. The numbers say almost nobody is streaming what they make. The bigger question in South Africa is whose work those models were trained on.
More than half of the music uploaded to Deezer every day is now fully AI-generated. That is the platform’s own figure, roughly 90,000 machine-made tracks a day, more than two million a month. If you have spent time in a Spotify Discover playlist or deep in a TikTok feed lately, you have already met a few. Competent and convincing, catchy even, and made by no one in particular. No one played on them. A prompt and a dataset did the work.
Cape Town has spent the best part of a decade watching its live rooms go dark. The Assembly, Mercury Live, the Raptor Room, The Waiting Room, the list of city-bowl venues that couldn’t make the maths work is long and well-rehearsed by now. Which is what makes the news out of 84 Shortmarket Street worth sitting with. The House of Machines isn’t closing. After thirteen years, it’s moving five metres across to a bigger space behind the big red door, with a send-off on 15 August the venue is calling “burning down this house.”
