Koolmuzone

» see koolmuzone.pk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Every country's music scene had a site like this and almost all of them were one person with a login. Somebody decided that the bands around them deserved writing about, started posting, and then kept posting for years while the rest of us assumed there was an organization behind it. There was not. There was a guy.

Koolmuzone started in 2004 and the guy was Hamad Dar. It covered Pakistani music at both ends, the acts on television and the ones playing to forty people, and the second half is what made it matter. A musician nobody had signed could send a track in and get it reviewed by someone who took it seriously. Radio was not going to do that. The labels were certainly not going to do that.

The distance between me and this site is not language, since it ran in English and I could have read every word of it. The distance is that Pakistan's music scene never reached Turkey in either direction. Two countries with a great deal in common culturally, and the bands stayed home. I was reading Turkish forums in exactly those years, watching people argue about hardware and post their signature lists, so I know the shape of what he built. I just never once landed on it.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

It won the Pakistan Blog Award for best music blog in 2010, which is the kind of prize that means less to outsiders than to the twenty people who were doing the same work badly. By 2012 the site was drawing between 350,000 and 400,000 hits a month, off a country where broadband was not exactly universal, and it had established itself well enough that established artists were sending in their material alongside the newcomers.

The moment it stopped being a fan site was the Coke Studio scoop. Coke Studio Pakistan had become the thing everyone watched, a corporate-funded television series that somehow turned into the country's main musical institution, and Koolmuzone published the second-season lineup before the official announcement. A blog with one staff member beat the press release. After that the industry had to treat it as press.

~ what really happened ~

There was no shutdown notice, because sites like this do not get one. In 2013 Dar lost access to the Facebook page, which by then was where the audience actually lived, and a large share of the advertising money he had been promised never reached him. Those two facts arriving in the same year answered the question that every solo publisher eventually has to ask, which is why exactly they are still doing this.

So he stopped. The posts thin out and then end, and the last of them sit there dated 2013 and 2014 like a room somebody walked out of. The domain still resolves. Nothing new has appeared on it in more than a decade.

~ the long tail ~

The show Koolmuzone scooped in 2009 kept going, and in 2022 a Coke Studio track called "Pasoori" turned into a genuine worldwide hit, the sort of thing that plays in cafes in cities that could not find Lahore on a map. Pakistani music got its global moment about eight years after the site that had been documenting it went quiet.

That is the ordinary tragedy of the one-person archive. The scene outlives the person writing it down, and the writing down turns out to have been the fragile part. A label can be sold. A blog just stops being paid for and takes its ten years of reviews down to a hosting account nobody renews.

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