Roster Is Building a Business Behind the Business of Music
South African music executive Thabiso Khati has launched Star Power, a free tool that lets users compare artists using available streaming and social data. Released publicly on 28 September, it gives each artist a score out of 100, with figures users can explore and share without signing up.
The tool taps into a familiar conversation among music fans: who has the bigger audience, and what numbers support the claim? For Khati, it also introduces people to Roster, the music business platform he launched earlier in September to help artists and their teams manage the work behind their careers.
While Star Power gives fans something to debate, Roster’s commercial proposition concerns the less visible tasks that keep an artist’s business running, from organising a release to following up on bookings and royalties.
Bringing the work into one place
Roster brings together release planning, bookings, contracts, rights registrations, royalties, fan management and financial administration. Khati has described the platform as a response to the fragmented working arrangements he encountered across his career in record companies, artist management and live entertainment.
For a small management team, that fragmentation can become harder to handle as an artist gets busier. A release schedule might sit in a spreadsheet, a performance contract in an email thread and travel arrangements in a messaging app. Keeping everything up to date takes time, particularly when several people need the same information.
Roster’s subscription model depends on making those tasks easier to coordinate. Connecting a booking to the relevant documents and financial records, for example, could reduce repeated work and give a manager a clearer view of what needs attention.
Star Power offers a possible way to introduce that broader service. Someone checking an artist’s audience figures may discover the platform behind the tool and explore what else it offers. This could make it a useful source of prospective customers, although its ability to generate paid subscriptions remains unproven.
Why this move makes sense
Khati is building around work that music professionals already do. His industry experience gives him a basis for understanding where delays, duplication and missing information can create problems, and which tasks a small team might welcome help with.
That matters because adopting new software involves effort. Managers need to move information, learn the system and decide whether they trust it with commercially important records. Familiar tools can be difficult to replace, even when using them together is cumbersome.
Star Power gives people an easier first encounter with Roster. They can try it out of curiosity, without committing to a subscription or reorganising their working day. Its appeal comes from presenting data through a conversation fans already enjoy.
The score does have limits. Khati says the tool uses available public data, identifies sources and marks unavailable figures. It can help users explore digital reach, but it cannot capture everything that makes an artist commercially or culturally important.
Building around an artist’s growth
As an artist takes on more releases, performances and partnerships, their team has more information to manage and more obligations to follow. That creates room for businesses that help keep the operation organised, particularly when hiring additional staff is difficult.
Roster’s opportunity is to become useful enough that teams return to it throughout the working week. The value might be as practical as finding a contract quickly, keeping a release on schedule or knowing which payment still needs chasing.
Star Power can bring people through the door. Giving them a reason to keep using Roster will depend on how well it handles those everyday demands.
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