Pakistani music industry of late is increasingly being styled after Bollywood, obviously at the cost of our own artistic uniqueness. Things are even worse if you look beyond the Urdu and mainstream Punjabi songs, as folk and regional artists lack outlets to broadcast their work, except one or two songs a year thanks to a major multinational. Enter Thaheer! A startup for the regional music.

Thaheer is a Quetta-based startup that wants to make Balochi (and regional) music great again. Just download the app, search for songs/artists, browse through existing albums, make your own playlists, download songs for offline play and so on. Like any other audio streaming portal works, except Thaheer is dedicated to Balochi music.

While it wants to become the go-to portal for regional music, currently the startup focuses on just Balochi songs, and those too are limited to the Makrani dialect.

“This is the most spoken dialect of Balochi so we wanted to address it first and already have the works of some 142 singers (which is the total artist population including both active and hall of fame). Now the next frontier is Mari and Bugti, and then Brahui, which is a whole another world in itself,” says the startup’s Chief Executive Officer Sab Azam Baloch.

Whats in it for the artists? We have a simple royalty-based model where singers would be paid a rupee for every stream/download through the app. As for the existing music, Thaheer got most of it from Radio Pakistan and individual artists for free and the remaining at minimal cost, as the latter wanted to market their work.

It all started off in 2016 as a final year project when three computer science students and friends - Azam Baloch, Farooq Abbas and Aurangzeb Mir - teamed up to develop a music streaming portal.

“We wanted to do something about Balochi music as there was no proper platform for that. After further research, we found it to be the same for other regional songs too,” Baloch recalls.

Why do we even need a dedicated portal for regional music though? There are already three homegrown streaming portals, with two of them into local content as well. Patari, in fact, has produced a fair bit of regional music, particularly Balochi, with Sibbi song and its artist Abid Brohi becoming instant hits.

“We have a much better connection with Balochi music and would go all in to cater that niche, which the mainstream players can’t manage,” says the CEO.

In addition, as seems to be the norm among local music streaming companies, Thaheer does its own production. In fact, they are currently working on launching a Coke Studio-styled season for Balochi music.

While one could always make arguments for and against entering into content creation for the wider tech startup community, Baloch and co have a much more convincing reason at least. Folk and regional songs do not have a very structured market, next to no way of earning money and a low-quality production.

“Often the singers record the song, save it in a USB and transfer it to shop owners who then pass it on. There is hardly any mixing and there are no good studios, so the quality is bad and this further repels listeners. But now, Thaheer is changing that as we are trying to get artists to record with us, on our expenses and with exclusive rights to us, so there is at least some decent quality Balochi music available.”

What about the money? Do they have an income stream in place yet? “At the moment, we generate revenues through Google ads but plan on introducing a subscription model soon,” the CEO says.

Let’s go step by step: the former is a game of low margins, high volumes which becomes a bit difficult when a startup is trying to cater to a niche, instead of the mainstream. Meanwhile, the latter is not that easy to implement considering how digital payments are still not common.

“Monetising through ads is definitely not the healthiest stream especially given how Google’s rates are quite low in Pakistan. But that’s where the paid subscription comes in, where we are trying to partner up with telcos and enable carrier billing and Easypaisa,” Baloch says. However, this is an area where even the more connected and funded startup have struggled, so how do these guys plan to tread that path?

“Last year, we launched another app called Thaheer pro where we priced songs and even movies, but the latter messed it up for us. So we did get the digital payments right but there was a problem with execution and strategy,” he adds. As of now, the venture is self-funded despite winning some prize monies in different competitions here and there, as the founders never got the cash.

Let us get to the potential market and its size now. Pakistan is surely a music-crazy nation but Thaheer is eyeing only a small chunk of it. So how big is the demand for Balochi music? Well, it is hard to come up with sophisticated figures but if a Facebook page were to serve as a very rough indicator, there are at least 84,000 fans of this category.

Add to that other regions and the number very conservatively gets to at least half a million people.

Baloch, however, does not only want to tap on to the existing listeners, but make a new market altogether.

The writer is member of staff:

m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com

Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2019