Culture

A billboard along the four-lane highway that runs from King Khalid International Airport across the desert into Riyadh features the smiling faces of the Kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz and its current ruler King Salman, as well as the stoic visage of a third, Muhammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, colloquially known as MBS. “Our real wealth,” the sign reads in Arabic, as well as English, “is in the ambition of our people.”
A second billboard advertises the event I’m here to see and features the images of another three men who could, in their own way, be important to the future of the rapidly changing country: Marshmello, David Guetta and DJ Khaled. They are among the hundreds of artists who in 2022 flew in from around the world to perform at Riyadh’s third annual Soundstorm, a dance-music-focused mega-festival that drew more than 150,000 people a day, including myself, to a site the size of Coachella.

This year, the festival is drawing more superstars to the region, with Eminem, U.K. rock legends Muse, Jared Leto’s band Thirty Seconds to Mars and dance titans Richie Hawtin and Marco Carola set to headline Soundstorm 2024 this December 12-14. Many more acts will be announced in the coming weeks, with this fifth edition of the festival marking the first time all of these phase one artists, outside Carola, will perform in the country.

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Another act that made its Saudi Arabia debut at Soundstorm is Metallica. At the 2023 festival this past December, flames shot from the festival’s massive mainstage — dubbed “Big Beast” — into the cold desert air as the band’s singer James Hetfield demanded “Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire!” while the crowd roared. Like the country’s electronic scene, the Saudi Arabian metal community once existed entirely underground, with secret shows happening at empty highway rest stations. In this new era of Saudi history,  Soundstorm drew one of the genre’s most popular bands of all time to Riyadh. In the crowd, fans made devil horns with their hands and thrust them into the night sky as Hetfield yelled “Burn Riyadh, burn!”

This past December, Soundstorm — its scale matched only by longstanding dance festivals like Tomorrowland and EDC Las Vegas — also featured headliners including Calvin Harris, Will Smith, 50 Cent, Swedish House Mafia, David Guetta, H.E.R., Travis Scott and J Balvin, and followed an annual industry conference, XP Music Futures, that featured a mix of global and local music executives discussing AI, emerging artists, climate action and more.

This past May, the festival’s parent company, MDLBEAST, kicked off a series of day-long workshops for groups of roughly 30 people from the local music scenes in Kuwait, Tunisia, Oman and Saudi (last year they also hosted workshops featuring a music production course by Afrojackand a primer on artist management) and they’re gearing up for the next XP conference ahead of this December’s festival.

MDLBEAST, which is leading the charge on music-related endeavors in Saudi, also operate a members-only club in Riyadh similar to the Soho House — Beast House, which also houses a recording studio — and a Riyadh nightclub, Attaché. Saudi’s first opera house is currently under construction nearby, with an arena and art museum also forthcoming.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

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British DJ and event producer Megatronic, whose Femme Fest event hosts shows by female-identifying artists and has been at the conference since its first year, says the event “is going to grow and be an important part of the fabric for the Gulf Region in terms of putting music out to the rest of the world.” She says international music industry figures have been moving to Saudi Arabia from Dubai — where she also lived for six years — because “Saudi is fresh; it’s vibrant compared to Dubai… in 10 years it might squash Dubai.” It’s also possible that with war affecting Israel’s position as the Middle East’s leading dance music destination, Saudi Arabia could rise up in its place.

This was all inconceivable less than a decade ago, when playing music in public was punishable by the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Activities like dancing, public hugging and gender mixing were also prohibited, until bin Salman stripped the religious police of much of their authority when he rose to power around 2016 and launched his national development project known as “Vision 2030.”

As part of that plan, Saudi Arabia has been working to broaden its economy from oil dependency — the state-run ARAMCO posted $121 billion in profit in 2023 — to encompass businesses like sports, technology, tourism and media and culture. That includes getting into the music business, which the country is doing the way it does everything: Fast, and on a grand scale, with no expense spared.

In 2018, Saudi’s General Entertainment Authority announced plans to invest $64 billion — more than double the value of the entire global music industry in 2023, according to the 2024 IFPI Global Report — into entertainment over the next decade. In 2020, the country formally launched the Saudi Music Commission, with British music trade association executive Paul Pacifico joining as CEO in January 2023.

The hope is that Saudi Arabia will develop a music business that can generate jobs, turn regional artists into stars, help the country present a more modern face to the world and unlock the Middle East as music’s next big growth market.

“Over the next few years, it’s going to be all about building the structures that allow people to express themselves creatively,” Pacifico said at a November panel about the Saudi music business at LA3C, an event in Los Angeles run by Billboard parent company PMC. “And building platforms that will enable Saudi artists to tell their stories in a way that will be heard around the world.”

Music execs from companies across the business have flown to Saudi to assess the opportunity. In June, Saudi media company SRMG partnered with Billboard to launch Billboard Arabia and in December debuted its website and two global charts: The Billboard Arabia Hot 100 and the Billboard Arabia Artist 100, showcasing the most popular talent in the Middle East and North Africa regions.

The 2024 IFPI Global Report found that total MENA revenues rose by 14.4% in 2023, following a 26.8% jump in 2022 that marked the world’s third-highest growth rate. According to the IFPI, streaming revenues accounted for 98.4% of the region’s market in the last year. While Saudi Arabia does not yet have its own collecting society, MDLBEAST Publishing was announced in June to support artists across the MENA region, partnering with U.K.-based publisher Sentric to provide global support with admin services like royalty collection.

Fans attend the perfomance of Dish-Dash DJ music artists during the Soundstorm 2022 music festival, organized by MDLBEAST, in Banban on the outskirts of the Saudi capital Riyadh on December 1, 2022.

Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

Pulling a traditional society into the 22nd century gives the country elements of the surreal. The image of the three royals from the highway billboard stares out from all over Riyadh, from banners on the sides of buildings to the Starbucks kiosk in my hotel lobby. In the room, an arrow on the ceiling points to Mecca — a common symbol at hotels across the Arab world to give Muslim visitors direction for prayer — and a live feed from the Great Mosque there plays 24 hours a day on the hotel TV. Other channels offer news, Middle Eastern soap operas and a falconry tournament. A U.K. woman here to work on the festival tells me that she, but not her male colleague, was escorted out of the hotel gym by staff — though hotels here are free to determine their own policies.

During my weekend at the rave, I’ll see a woman in a hijab dance to hip-hop and a tent where attendees observe the call to prayer while the music stops. I’ll be offered party drugs in a country where even alcohol is illegal and hear Fat Joe onstage demanding “what’s love got to do with a little ménage?” in a place where I’ve been advised to keep my ankles and elbows covered.

“This is all a huge change socially,” says Courtney Freer, visiting assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory University. Saudi women have only been able to drive since 2018. Over the last decade, the Saudi royal family has eased and in some cases eliminated other restrictions on women, including the requirement to wear a hijab, although many still do, often for their own cultural and religious reasons. Women can also now travel outside the country without a male guardian. Human Rights Watch senior women’s rights researcher Rothna Begum says that for some women, particularly the middle class, these changes are “significant,” even in some cases “life changing.”

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia formally opened to non-religious tourists in 2019, and it now takes only about 10 minutes to apply for a visa online. This past spring, the Saudi Tourism Authority web site FAQ was updated to declare that “Everyone is welcome to visit Saudi” in response to the question “Are LGBT members welcome to visit?” (This answer also asks that “they follow and respect our culture, traditions and laws as you would when visiting any other country in the world,” although it doesn’t specify them.) Other questions include “Is Saudi Arabia safe?” (“very”), “Is alcohol available in Saudi Arabia?” (“no”) and “Is it possible for women to wear swimsuits in public?” (“On public beaches, visitors are expected to wear modest clothing.”)

Partying with tens of thousands of strangers at a massive rave about 40 minutes outside of Riyadh is, apparently, perfectly fine.

But despite the new freedoms, there are still constraints. Free speech is not protected, and while the country has no written laws on sexual orientation, judges often use Islamic law to punish homosexual activity and sex outside marriage, and even advocating for gay rights online can be a punishable offense, according to Human Rights Watch LGBT Rights Program Senior Researcher Rasha Younes. In March 2022, the government passed a Personal Status Law that gave women certain rights but also requires that they get the approval of a male guardian in order to get married. This law also says that wives must “obey in righteousness” and that a husband can withhold financial support if his wife “refuses herself” without “a legitimate reason.”

In the historically progressive electronic music scene, a world pioneered by Black and gay people, the Saudi-funded Soundstorm is thus “very polarizing in our community,” says Silvia Montello, who was CEO of the Association for Electronic Music (AFEM) when we spoke.

“Beyond What You Think You Know”

To some critics, Soundstorm is a glitzy distraction from the Saudi government’s human rights violations. Women, LGBTQ people, migrant workers and journalists have faced repression from the same government that’s helping fund the country’s forays into music. In 2018, journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul; in 2021, the Biden administration released a report saying bin Salman approved the killing of Khashoggi, although MBS has denied this. This past August, a retired teacher was sentenced to death for tweets criticizing the government, and in January a Saudi women’s rights activist was sentenced to 11 years in prison for charges including “indecent” clothing and promoting women’s rights on social media.

But some festival participants believe that music and events can drive social change and hope their participation will fuel more progress. “Some of my first shows in Saudi touched me deep,” David Guetta said during his 2022 XP keynote. “I’m sure everyone here can feel it. We’re witnessing a moment in history.”

“Ten or 20 years from now, there’s going to be books written about how Saudi changed,” says a non-Saudi music industry executive who’s worked with MDLBEAST. “If we all play our cards right, electronic music will be a chapter in that book. Don’t we all want that?”

People attend the MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2022 music festival in Banban on the northern outskirts of Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh on December 1, 2022.

Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

Social progress is part of the mission for MDLBEAST, the roughly 100-person organization that produces Soundstorm and several other festivals and events around the Gulf with a combination of government and private funding. Though it operates in partnership with various Saudi government divisions, the country’s politics “have nothing to do with us as an organization,” says its chief creative officer Ahmad Alammary, who goes by his DJ name, Baloo.

Raised in Riyadh, Alammary grew up listening to music — house, disco, new wave — with his family and started DJing in 1997 while attending American University in Washington D.C., once receiving a call from the Saudi consulate telling him to stop playing at clubs if he wanted to keep his scholarship.

Nonetheless, he returned to Riyadh in 2002 with eight boxes of vinyl and began DJing illegal underground parties where, he says, “The people, the ‘extracurriculars,’ everything looked, felt and sounded like any other party I would attend around the world.” When an event Alammary was scheduled to play was raided in 2004, he moved to Dubai, scored a residency at a club in Bahrain, then moved to New York City and earned his Masters from Pratt Institute’s Design Management program.

When he returned home again in 2013, Alammary found “a different society — art exhibitions, film screenings, gatherings with mixed crowds.” In 2019, he helped form MDLBEAST with the government’s blessing, booking the first Soundstorm with local artists, plus dance music titans like Guetta, Steve Aoki, Tiësto and Afrojack. More than one member of the MDLBEAST team compares this first festival to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Every Saudi DJ got off the decks in complete shambles, tearful, in disbelief,” Alammary recalls.

Alammary says most fans who were interested in this first Soundstorm didn’t even believe it would happen — “they were like, ‘bulls–t,’” he remembers — with the crowd only swelling on the second day when locals realized it was real and began arriving by the carload.  

Now, with a staff that’s 50% women, the festival promoter seeks to become “one of the top brands known for gender diversity” with equitable lineups and “minority inclusion across our experiences,” according to an internal strategy document provided to Billboard, while it aims to “own the music industry in the Middle East” by increasing “the GDP of MENA [the Middle East and North Africa] Music Biz,” “promote Saudi as a global music destination,” “export cultural IP” and “inspire and promote progressive culture.”

“The truth is, though, we have to work harder because of where we’re from,” the document reads. “Beyond the money. Beyond the stereotypes. Beyond what you think you know.”

At The Festival

While female dancers in red, skintight latex bodysuits writhe around 50 Cent during a performance of “Drop It Like It’s Hot” on stage at Soundstorm this past December, festival attendees, all 16 and older, wear traditional robes or abayas, streetwear or jeans. Many women wear surgical masks to ensure they won’t be recognized in photographs. Ticket prices start at SAR 169, or about $45. A private suite with its own concierge goes for SAR 80,000, or about $21,000. Fans with premium access never even need touch the ground — a miles-long network of 15-foot-high walkways connect viewing areas at the event’s seven stages. On one stretch, a muscular man with army fatigues and a gun holster escorts a group of elegantly dressed women to the “VIB” — short for “very important beast” — area.

Each evening around seven, the music stops for about 15 minutes during the call to prayer, during which a small percentage of the crowd enters a designated tent to observe. Alcohol is illegal in Saudi, so the drink stands sell bottled soft drinks. Even so, a festival employee tells me backstage that “everyone here is shitfaced.” (I’m told that alcohol is brought in from Bahrain.) In the crowd a man offers me “pills to party.” I decline. A Soundstorm spokesperson says the festival has a zero-tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol and security removes violators.

Attendees dance during the MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2022 music festival in Banban on the northern outskirts of Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh on December 1, 2022.

Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

The first year of Soundstorm was hard to book, as many artists were reluctant to play in the country, says MDLBEAST Strategy Director Nada Alhelabi. She says assembling the lineup “gets easier every year.” The industry executive who’s worked with MDLBEAST says that while artists earned two or three times their normal fee at the first festival, rates have since come down to standard (mid-to-high six figures for top-tier acts). As at most dance-focused festivals, the 2022 and 2023 Soundstorm lineups skew heavily male, although there are performances from women including Peggy Gou, Nervo, La Fleur, Anne-Marie, Carlita, Nora En Pure, and many Middle Eastern artists including Cosmicat, who grew up in the coastal city of Jeddah and was studying to be a dentist before a DJ career became possible.

Saudi’s General Authority of Statistics reports that 67% of the population is younger than 35, data cited repeatedly by artists and executives who are here to assess the market. Backstage before his Soundstorm 2022 set, Dutch producer Hardwell tells me that Saudi “feels to me how it did when I started playing in the States around 2010 when the whole EDM thing blew up.”

The country’s music investments still seem to exist outside the realm of supply and demand, however. Soundstorm is not yet profitable, although Alammary predicts it will break even in the next few years.

The most striking difference between Soundstorm and other festivals is that in 2022 and years prior, attendees were overwhelmingly male. In the 2022 crowd, I count roughly one woman for every 20 men. Sexual harassment has been an issue at Soundstorm since its 2019 debut, and every year, several female attendees post on social media about being harassed, even groped. Co-ed events are still relatively new, and organizers “are doing everything they can to make it safe for women,” says the industry executive who’s worked with MDLBEAST. “They’re not sweeping it under the carpet.”

In both 2022 and 2023, LED signs and bathroom-stall posters promote Respect & Reset, MDLBEAST’S anti-harassment program, which brings in 250 staffers to offer support in the crowd at four tents, where anyone who has been harassed can report the incident and get support. More established events around the world devote fewer resources to the issue, says Respect & Reset Co-Director Judy Bec, who operates similar anti-harassment programs at festivals in her native U.K.

People attend the MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2022 music festival in Banban on the northern outskirts of Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh on December 1, 2022.

Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

On Saturday night during Swedish House Mafia’s 2022 set, I’m groped from behind on two separate occasions by men who stick their hands between my thighs and grab. (I don’t report either incident, since both men disappear into the crowd.) A male friend does his best to protect me and a female companion, but being in the crowd is hectic until a group of courteous Saudi men create a wall around us. I don’t see any similar incidents in the premium viewing areas, where the crowd is older and more gender balanced. A female journalist who traveled from Europe for Soundstorm in 2022 and 2023 says that while the festival was generally less crowded in 2023, GA attendees at this most recent event were more gender balanced, a shift, this journalist says, that made the atmosphere less threatening and more like other festivals around the world.

On the final night of Soundstorm 2022, I see two men embracing on a patch of fake grass in the general admission area. Alammary, the MDLBEAST creative director, remembers asking a DJ he wanted to perform at Soundstorm questioning the offer because of the country’s hostility toward gay rights. “I told him, ‘I understand and respect that, but I need you to also understand that everyone is on the dance floor,’” Alammary remembers. “Everyone is behind the decks. We don’t care about anybody’s background or orientation.”

There’s evidence that he’s right. A 2021 U.S. State Department report on human rights in Saudi Arabia ends with a single sentence: “Observers at the December MDLBeast [sic] Soundstorm music festival reported that it included the public display of LGBTQI+ culture.”

“They’re Taking The Music Business Very Seriously”

Amy Thomson, Swedish House Mafia’s former manager who now runs her own rights management platform, travelled to XP 2022 to speak on a panel because she says “it was important for me to come see if they’re taking it seriously…and clearly, they’re taking the music business very seriously.” Though she says she nearly canceled the trip three times, she ultimately chose to attend, as “you can’t just run around the world just throwing your opinion without education.”

Mirik Milan, the former night mayor of Amsterdam and founder of the nightlife consultancy VibeLab, who has come to XP since its first year, says he’s seen “a cultural renaissance has taken place in the last couple of years,” but “we should also not be naïve. Music and nightlife have the power to change people’s lives, but they won’t inflict a power change in Saudi or anywhere in the world.” To him, the point is the people of Saudi experiencing the joy of dance music.

On the final night of Soundstorm 2022, three Saudi women in their early 30s, all of whom speak English, sit at a picnic table and talk about life before bin Salman’s reforms.

Until a decade ago, they say, the most exciting form of legal entertainment was a restaurant with dancing waiters. The reforms have made dating easier, they say, since they no longer have to chaperone one another on secret visits to mens’ houses. “We’d be nervous, like ‘don’t drink anything; be careful,’” says one. “Now you can just go to a coffee shop.” Even now, though, they say the lives of Saudi women depend significantly on the permissiveness of their fathers. “And if it’s not your dad, it’s your siblings, or your uncles, or your cousins,” says another. “Someone in the family is going to stand up and say ‘no.’”

Dressed in jeans and T-shirts, they say they’re happy that the women here in hijabs can experience the festival, because, the first one says, “It’s getting them out of their comfort zone.” The second says she was excited when tourists started coming, since “a lot of the terrorist [activity] created a big cloud on us that really doesn’t show who we are as people.”

That’s one reason they appreciate the DJs and artists who do make the trip. A third woman says she especially loves Guetta for coming here to play when the country first opened for foreign entertainment.

But she loves bin Salman even more, for making all of this possible.

“I am,” she says, “his biggest fan.”

About this reporting: Billboard assumed all costs related to travel to and from Saudi Arabia, including hotel accommodations. MDLBEAST helped arrange a travel visa. While in Saudi Arabia, the writer was part of a press entourage for which the festival provided transportation to and from XP and Soundstorm, along with sightseeing. 

Billboard’s parent company, PMC, received a minority investment from SRMG, a publicly traded media company based in Saudi Arabia and Dubai, in early 2018.