Earlier this week, the inaugural edition of Saudi Arabia’s XP Music Conference took place over three days and nights in Riyadh, drawing hundreds of music industry professionals and artists from around the Persian Gulf and beyond.
“We’re very excited about the opening up of Saudi Arabia as a music market,” says Moe Hamzeh, Managing Director, Warner Music Middle East, a panelist at the event. “Festivals such as Soundstorm are showing how much enthusiasm there is here for live music, and we already see huge volumes of recorded music consumption [from Saudi Arabia] on platforms such as YouTube and Spotify,” he adds.
Jeddah-based DJ Ahmad Almalki was similarly upbeat about the musical awakening happening in his country at the moment. “I’m more into the cut-and-dried business talk — I don’t really like the sappy ‘you can do it’ speeches,” he says. “I wanna find out about policy and data and hard numbers more.”
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