In Pakistan, YouTube is widely used across all classes and backgrounds, while subscription-based platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are largely restricted to elite young urbanites. Most music, however, continues to circulate through USBs, WhatsApp and Bluetooth sharing, FM radio, and live gatherings, highlighting a listening culture that thrives largely independent of global streaming services. This has deep implications for monetisation and digital equity. Revenue from views and streams in Pakistan is minimal compared to the global North, reflecting a form of digital colonialism in which platforms prioritise foreign markets while undervaluing local audiences. Informal frameworks, such as live performances at weddings, mehfils, and shrine gatherings, play a vital role in sustaining musical life and cultural exchange, while also generating income for artists. In contrast, USB distribution, Bluetooth transfers, and WhatsApp forwards circulate music widely but rarely provide direct earnings for artists. Artists navigate a hybrid ecology in which circulation is robust but economic rewards remain constrained, shaping both the content and reach of their work.

Punjab’s musical landscape is dominated by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pathane Khan, Attaullah Esakhelvi and Allah Ditta Loonay Wala, to name a few. Their songs pervade homes, roadside shops, and social gatherings, illustrating that musical presence does not always correlate with digital visibility. Even Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan became a household name after his album Haq Ali Ali became a best-seller in the British market, and consequently, his performance at Live at WOMAD 1985, decades after he started performing live. The international recognition retroactively reinforced his local legitimacy, demonstrating how global acclaim can enhance domestic appeal. Similarly, Sindh’s folk traditions thrive through Abida Parveen, Sanam Marvi, Manzoor Sakhirani, and Jalal Chandio, most of whose celebrated recordings are live performances that capture the improvisation and emotive nuance of oral traditions. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Zarsanga, the “Queen of Pashtun Folklore,” Haroon Bacha, Karan Khan, to name a few, continue to shape musical taste through community networks and live gatherings. Balochistan’s scene is animated by Akhtar Chanal Zahri, Noor Jehan Baloch, Sarmad Baloch, and Ustad Noor Baksh, to name a few, who maintain visibility through weddings, radio, and regional performances, rather than online platforms. In all of Pakistan, Bollywood music, ofcourse, is also extremely popular and resonates with the listeners.

While Spotify charts in Pakistan may suggest a thriving industry, the music that performs best on such platforms is often tailored to global urban tastes. Highly compressed mixes, formulaic song structures, and overproduced arrangements dominate the algorithm, privileging a soundscape that mirrors Western pop more than local traditions. Choruses are trimmed to thirty-second hooks optimized for playlists, rhythmic complexity is sacrificed for metronomic precision, and vocals are polished with pitch correction until all traces of human grain are erased. Such production values may align with an internationalized aesthetic, but they also flatten the very improvisation, emotional immediacy, and regional inflection that give South Asian music its depth. The result is a homogenised output, pleasing to algorithms but detached from the lived texture of Pakistani musical life.

By contrast, Pakistan’s classical, folk, and ghazal traditions have historically thrived on frameworks of call and response, collective improvisation, and subtle tempo shifts that unfold organically in live performance. A qawwal ensemble, for instance, stretches a single verse through spiralling repetitions, modulating according to the audience’s reactions, handclaps, and spontaneous invocations. A ghazal baithak or raga performance depends on a delicate interplay between singer and accompanist, with microtonal ornamentation and elastic timing that cannot be reduced to a fixed studio grid. These forms lose their vitality when forced into the rigid metrics of a studio production cycle designed for streaming consumption. Producers like Rohail Hyatt, particularly in his early Coke Studio seasons, demonstrated that it is possible to capture this vitality in recorded form—by allowing improvisation, layering acoustic textures, and respecting the spiritual intensity of call-and-response traditions. Yet most commercial producers struggle to replicate this balance, defaulting instead to over-arranged, lifeless tracks that fail to resonate either with local audiences or with the deeper aesthetic roots of Pakistani music.

Short-form platforms such as TikTok have recently surged in rural areas, where sequences under a minute circulate rapidly and shape taste. These snippets often condense qawwali, folk, or popular songs into hooks emphasising rhythm or melody over progressive nuances. While this increases reach, monetisation remains minimal, and the depth of musical experience is often compromised. Consequently, musicians continue to rely on live, intimate spaces such as ghazal baithaks, classical music mehfils, and shrine performances. These venues preserve intergenerational knowledge, improvisational skill, and emotional expressiveness, dimensions that algorithmic platforms cannot replicate.

Shrine-based performances play a central role in sustaining qawwali and folk traditions. Devotional gatherings, often lasting hours, integrate call-and-response singing, improvised verses, and audience participation. Such events function as both religious rituals and critical forums for cultural continuity. Ghazal baithaks and classical mehfils cultivate attentive audiences, offering vital spaces for female and marginalised artists who often operate outside mainstream recording channels. These live forms maintain musical depth while reinforcing community bonds and regional identity, counterbalancing the globalised, homogenised, digital-centric circulation of music.

This dichotomy also reflects structural inequalities. Global streaming platforms prioritize Northern markets, marginalizing revenue for Pakistani artists. Folk musicians, female performers, and regionally rooted artists are underrepresented in curated playlists, limiting visibility and compensation. Meanwhile, live gatherings and traditional transmission methods ensure cultural knowledge circulates, sustaining lineages that might otherwise vanish under digital homogenization.

Pakistan’s musical life thus demonstrates a complex interplay between global validation, algorithmic neglect, and local circulation. Music flourishes not merely through streaming numbers but through attentive audiences, shared memory, and performance practice. USB culture, shrine-based qawwali, ghazal sessions, TikTok snippets, and mehfils collectively sustain the vibrancy of folk, classical, and popular traditions. The survival and evolution of these forms depend on community engagement, intergenerational learning, and live performance, elements that remain central to the country’s sonic identity, far beyond the logic of monetization or global algorithmic metrics. In Pakistan, music thrives not because it is streamed, but because it is lived.

The writer is a freelance columnist and a social scientist.

Note: This article first appeared in The Nation September 16, 2025.