گل سن

Every now and then in Pakistani music a voice takes off, from seemingly nowhere. About 3 months ago, Sabaat Batin became one of those voices with his song Gal Sun.

There is no need to say anything too complicated about Gal Sun, except that it is an excellent melody delivered with effortless, raw style. I use the term effortless, knowing that this is in fact not really true. Because if you scroll down not too far down Sabaat’s Instagram profile you see him singing many songs to the camera, just him and the lens. Gal Sun is one of them. So whatever we call this effortless style has behind it a persistence and hope. Why one song catches fire is anyone’s guess as much as mine, but that this one did makes me happy.

What’s been interesting to observe about the growth of Gal Sun has been the immense following it has received from India. This is remarkable because a Pakistani song became a hit in India after May’s 4-day war, that significantly changed the Pakistani music industry.

Pakistani musicians were banned from being listened to on major online platforms in India. This is obviously a huge cultural fracture. But it has had large implications on the economics of Pakistani music. The subset of Pakistani musicians that are able to sustain their craft financially through music also, rely on concerts, brand deals, and streaming revenue. For the biggest Pakistani musicians, the amount of streaming they got from India was significant. It was not uncommon for Pakistani musicians to have more Indian listeners than Pakistani ones. In addition, Indian streams as far as I understand, are worth more than Pakistani streams financially because ad revenue in India is higher. Add this to the fact that Pakistani artists which have signed with labels, now have even bigger business commitments to meet, which also factored in their Indian audience. The overall result is that Pakistani music now needs to look elsewhere to make up for this revenue, and has come to the realization that relying on Indian listeners is not a source of stability.

Being banned in India was also a weird marker of cultural relevance. Because there was no way to just request a blanket ban on Pakistani artists from the big streaming companies. And it appears that a list was manually created listing all the artists that should be banned. This meant that an unknown voice would slip through, and Sabaat Batin went through that door with some force. And now the comments from India are easy to find on his videos. In another example, Pal Pal, one of the other recent hits from Pakistan, was also released in a version with Talwiinder, who is an Indian diaspora artists. This has caused many people to be confused if Pal Pal was an Indian or Pakistani song to begin with.