Anghami has a new pitch for up-and-coming Arab musicians: don’t just upload a track and hope for the best. The MENA streaming company has shared the first results from Sawt Jdeed, its in-house program for scouting and scaling early-career Arab artists — and the debut numbers are eye-catching, even if they come from a single test case.
That test case is Yamane El Hage, a Lebanese singer working in the “Mrafraf El Dalal” tradition. She reworked a song made famous by her mother, the celebrated artist Fadia Tanb El-Hage, and released it exclusively on Anghami on July 2. In under two weeks, the company says, her daily streams climbed roughly 300x, weekly unique listeners jumped 160x, and the exclusive track alone pulled in more than 120,000 plays.
The figure Anghami cares about most, though, is what happened to the rest of her music. Yamane’s back catalogue added around 200,000 streams over the same period, pushing her lifetime total past 2.5 million. Egypt led the listening, followed by Lebanon — evidence, the company argues, that the platform can carry a regional artist across borders instead of just spiking one song.
A discovery play, not just a hit
“Sawt Jdeed exists because we believe the next generation of Arab artists deserves more than an upload button,” said Salam Kmeid, Anghami’s head of music marketing. “The catalogue uplift is the number that matters most to us. It tells us people did not just show up for a track. They discovered an artist.”
The mechanics are familiar. Anghami watches for songs gaining organic traction, then puts editorial support, playlisting and an exclusivity window behind the artist. Yamane’s track was already climbing before the company pulled her into the program — much the same model Spotify’s RADAR and other discovery schemes have run for years, now aimed squarely at Arabic-language talent.
A little context is worth keeping in mind. A 300x jump is dramatic partly because it starts from a very small base; turning a few hundred daily plays into tens of thousands is not the same challenge as moving an established star. One artist over one two-week window is also a thin proof point, and the exclusivity that inflated these numbers ends this week. The real test is whether Sawt Jdeed can do it again with its second, fifth and twentieth artist.
Still, it’s the kind of win Anghami wants to be able to point to. The NASDAQ-listed company (ticker: ANGH) merged with video service OSN+ in 2024 and now claims more than 120 million registered users, 2.5 million paying subscribers and a catalogue topping 100 million tracks across 16 MENA markets. Owning discovery — rather than just licensing other people’s catalogues — is how streaming services argue they’re more than a dumb pipe. Sawt Jdeed is Anghami’s bet that it can find the region’s next star before anyone else does.
