Saudi Arabia’s music revolution: From underground scene to global stage

In the mid-2010s, Nouf Sufyani worked nine-to-five as a dentist. Today, she is one of Saudi Arabia’s most recognized DJ-producers. She goes by the stage name Cosmicat and has performed with dance heavyweights David Guetta and Martin Garrix.

She described what it was like growing up in Jeddah on Saudi Arabia’s west coast. Sufyani said she experimented with writing, singing and producing, inspired by “the golden age of music in the 90s and early 2000s.”

Her main contact with music, as for many young Saudis, was through music television channels, which she explained were “important” in bringing her “into a new world of culture.”

Despite this, she “never thought about becoming a professional musician given the circumstances of the time.”

In April 2016, the Saudi cabinet sharply curtailed the powers of a committee that patrolled streets to prohibit certain activities, including music in public. One month later, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the creation of the General Entertainment Authority as part of Vision 2030. The GEA was established to play a key role in the Kingdom’s drastic reform to diversify the economy away from the oil sector. In a 2017 interview with Al Arabiya, MBS noted that Saudis were spending roughly $22 billion a year on entertainment and tourism abroad, and said he wanted to bring a quarter of that spending home. Music was central to that plan.

Since then, the change has been striking. From no commercial revenue 10 years ago, the Saudi music ecosystem is estimated to be worth $3.4 billion by 2034, according to a report from the Music Commission. Streaming royalties for Saudi artists on Spotify reached $3.5 million in 2024, with Saudi music consumption up 195 percent since 2020. The shift is also a cultural disruption. MDLBEAST’s Soundstorm is now one of the largest music festivals in the world by attendance.

Mixed-gender concerts became legal for the first time in 2018. Young women at the festival speaking to Deutsche Welle (DW) in 2023 said they couldn’t imagine something like this happening five years earlier.

Paul Pacifico, a British harmonica player and music industry executive, is now running Saudi Arabia’s Music Commission. The CEO said what is genuinely distinctive is the undersupply of music.

What tends to happen in digital markets is “you have a huge number of people releasing music” vying for limited attention. In Saudi Arabia, “there is an undersupply [as] the sector is so new.”

Consequently, the commission is looking to expand investment in supply, from equipment and venues to the artists themselves, he said. The investment in music education is also striking, since the first music teaching institute was established in Riyadh as recently as 2019, launched by Egyptian violinist Mahmoud Sorour. Today, there are over 80 specialized music schools with around 25,000 students enrolled.

Whilst the investment is plain to see and the industry growth undeniable, what is perhaps less obvious is what a Saudi music culture looks like. Music did not arrive in Saudi Arabia with Vision 2030.

While the traditional migratory lifestyle of the Bedouin discouraged the excessive baggage of instruments, this developed a distinctive percussive music usually accompanying songs based on traditional poetry. Small instruments like the double-reeded nay flute or the stringed rababa were sometimes used after being obtained in cosmopolitan cities such as Jeddah.

These influences form the basis of Gulf (Khaliji) music dating back over 1,000 years to the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates from Damascus and Baghdad. This genre was modernized in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait in the second half of the 20th century.

As a Saudi artist, Sufyani pushed back against the perception that the new music industry is simply a Western template laid over a blank page. Traditional influences, she says, “are part of our identity and we embrace them fully.”

Even contemporary dance music predates the more recent policies. DJ Solskin told DW in 2023 there was a big but “very intimate” underground scene. She felt like the changes in the country were “the world outside catching up to the world behind closed doors.”

Over 60 percent of Saudis are under the age of 35 and, by all accounts, seem to be embracing these changes, while 90 percent of streaming royalties come from international markets. This high demand at home and abroad, along with state-led investment flooding in, bodes well for the continued rise of music in Saudi Arabia.