Taazi

» see taazi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2015 my music problem was which service to keep paying for. That is a luxury problem and it only exists in a market where the legal option is also the convenient one. Taazi was built for the opposite situation: a country with a real music industry and no lawful way to buy a song out of it.

Haroon built it. Aaron Haroon Rashid came up as the singer in Awaz, which formed in Islamabad in 1992 and was the biggest band in Pakistan for most of the decade, and he later created the animated series Burka Avenger. He put a team of programmers and musicians on the project for about three years. A version of the site was already up during 2014 and the formal launch came in August 2015, as a division of his production company Unicorn Black. It called itself Pakistan's first legal music website, which sounds like marketing and was accurate: everything on it was there because a signed agreement said it could be.

The catalog was not small. Coke Studio seasons one through eight, along with EMI Pakistan's library and Nescafe Basement. More than 100,000 songs and over 2,500 artists enlisted. The Android app passed 100,000 downloads by October 2015. You paid with mobile credit or, from abroad, with PayPal, and 70 percent of what you paid went to the person who made the record.

I have no contact with any of this. Pakistan is not a market I have ever been a customer in, and I had not heard the name before going looking for it. What I recognize is the shape of the bet. Somebody looked at an audience taking everything for nothing and concluded that the reason was the absence of an alternative rather than the presence of a price. That bet has been placed in a lot of countries and it has mostly lost.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the model ~

The 70/30 split is the part worth writing down, because it was not a streaming split. Taazi sold downloads. An artist uploaded a track, took the standard contract, kept the copyright and collected 70 percent of the revenue on each purchase, which is roughly the iTunes deal and enormously better than any per-stream rate before or since. The billing was the harder half of the engineering. Card penetration in Pakistan was low, so Taazi accepted mobile credit, which meant a listener could buy a song against their phone balance without ever holding a bank account.

The diaspora was the other half of the pitch. Pakistani music has an audience across the Gulf and North America that the domestic industry had almost no mechanism to charge, and Taazi took PayPal from anywhere. In principle a listener in Manchester could put money directly into the hands of a musician in Lahore. In practice the volume never arrived.

~ what got buried with it ~

Taazi did not lose to Spotify. Spotify reached Pakistan in February 2021, after Taazi was already gone. It lost to free. Patari launched a month behind it in September 2015 making the same argument about paying artists and never found traction either. What actually won was bestsongs.pk, which turned up in April 2017, mixed Pakistani music with Bollywood, and passed a million installs inside a year, more than Taazi and Patari managed between them.

Nothing was announced. The company was wound up during 2020 and the site stopped answering. taazi.com now returns a bare 503 error page, and the old v1.taazi.com subdomain that search engines still carry artist pages for does not resolve at all. Nobody posted a farewell. For a service whose entire proposition was that every track on it had a signed agreement behind it, there is no public record of where those agreements went, or of any recording that existed only there.

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