Pakistan's rap scene has peaked commercially, not creatively

From a downloaded DAW to Young Stunners

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Umair Tahir as someone he had been trying to get on the show for four or five months — a guest who, at just 18, had already produced for Young Stunners, Hasan Raheem, and Anurag Khalid. The first thing Muzamil wants to understand is simple: how does it feel to be this mainstream this young?

Umair’s answer is disarmingly honest. “Fate hai yeh,” he says — it’s fate. He had no idea this is where he would end up.

The origin story is unglamorous in the best way. Around 2012 or 2013, when Umair was roughly eight or nine years old, he came across a local Karachi artist called Vias. Something about that music made him want to make music himself. He downloaded a studio software — with some difficulty — and started experimenting. For years he made electronic and house music. Then, around 2018 or 2019, he switched to hip hop.

When Muzamil asks how he actually learned the craft — courses, documentaries, a mentor — Umair is straightforward: “Maine as such koi course nahi kiya. YouTube par tutorials dekhta tha bahut aur bas experiment kar karke sara scene.” No formal training. Just YouTube and repetition.

What a music producer actually does

Because Pakistan’s music industry has only recently begun to understand the producer’s role, Muzamil asks Umair to explain it plainly. Umair obliges. A singer’s role is visible. A guitarist’s role is visible. A producer’s role has historically been invisible — but that is changing. He points to Talal Qureshi appearing on Coke Studio as a standalone credit, not just a background figure, as a sign of that shift.

In practical terms, Umair describes the workflow: an artist writes lyrics to a tempo, Umair builds the beat, the artist records over it and sends it back. The beat is the foundation everything else is built on.

Young Stunners, he clarifies, is not a duo — it is a trio. There are two rappers and a main producer, Mehr, who has been with them from the beginning. Umair collaborates with them but is not their primary producer. He describes Mehr and the Young Stunners as a significant part of his own musical education: “Mera aadha music unse seekha hai. Meri inspiration hi hui hai.”

The commercial peak and the label gap

Muzamil pushes on where the rap industry is headed. Umair’s read is precise: it has peaked commercially. Hip hop is now on Pepsi, on Coke, on every major brand. But the infrastructure that would take it further — record labels — is still missing.

“Mere hisaab se peak hua hai commercially bahut peak hua hai. Magar yeh hai ke ab bas thode labels wagera hi kami hain.” Outside Pakistan, labels sign artists and give them a sustainable income. Here, that system does not exist. Investors put money elsewhere. Brands fill the gap, but brands come with constraints — they can demand edits, they can sensor content, and they carry their own equity that limits what an artist can say.

Muzamil raises the producer’s position specifically. A front-facing artist can at least get concert bookings. What does a producer get? Umair acknowledges the situation is complicated — there are lump-sum arrangements, and sometimes producers perform as well — but the royalty and revenue infrastructure that exists in mature markets simply is not there yet.

Why hip hop came from Karachi and Rawalpindi

Muzamil asks about the geography of Pakistan’s rap scene. Umair’s answer is rooted in the nature of the genre itself. Proper rap, he says, comes most strongly from Karachi, and from Rawalpindi and Islamabad — with Pindi producing more than Islamabad proper.

The reason is straightforward: “Hip hop jo matlab bilkul raw cheez hai streets and culture sara. To matlab jo Karachi mein banda ek hood mein reh raha hai, uske paas story hai kuch rap karne ki.” Karachi has a large educated population living in a tough environment, doing odd jobs, navigating a city that does not always reward education with comfort. That tension produces stories. Those stories produce rap.

Pindi has a similar street-level vibe compared to Islamabad, which is why more comes from there. Muzamil notes that Punjab has more than half of Pakistan’s population but has not produced mainstream Punjabi hip hop at scale. Umair points to Shamoon Ismail as an exception — someone who raps properly, in Punjabi, and who Umair places in his personal top five or six. He recommends the album Scars and Screws, specifically the title track and a collaboration with Talanjum, as examples of hardcore rap that most listeners may have missed.

COVID, Instagram, and the discovery wave

Muzamil asks how COVID changed things. Umair’s view is that it accelerated an emergence. Before COVID, the music industry had a status quo — the same people cycling through the same spaces. Post-COVID, new artists appeared almost daily.

The mechanism was simple: schools, colleges, and universities shut down. People had time. They explored their creative selves, posted videos, and some of those videos found audiences. Umair names Shae Gill — the artist behind Pasoori — as an Instagram find. Anurag Khalid is another. “Is tarah ke bahut saare artists jo hain woh suddenly discover hue hain aur woh kar gaye hain.”

The downside was that live shows disappeared entirely during the core COVID period. Music was being made but had nowhere to be performed. Umair notes this as the one real cost — the inspiration that comes from moving around, from being in rooms with people, was briefly cut off.

Social commentary, the underground, and what brands won’t allow

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises something he says he has been waiting for: hip hop as social commentary. Globally, the genre emerged partly as a vehicle for suppressed voices. In Pakistan, he is not hearing that. He points to Faris Shafi’s “Awaam” as a rare example — a genuinely bold piece of work that named untouchable institutions and religious clergy at a time when that was a significant risk.

Umair’s response draws a clear line between underground and commercial. “Underground ke andar aap jitna aap commercial ko gaana kar rahe ho to usme aap har cheez baat nahi kar sakte matlab ke brand kahega, sensor kar do.” The social commentary exists — Young Stunners and others have done it — but it lives in the underground, and the underground, almost by definition, stays underground.

Muzamil presses further: is it that artists are not yet big enough brands to take that risk? Umair does not fully disagree. The commercial machinery — brands, Coke Studio, Pepsi — brings reach but also brings limits. A label like Sony Music, he notes, would tell an artist to make their art and let the label worry about monetising it. That freedom does not exist in Pakistan’s current setup.

On Coke Studio specifically, Umair’s assessment is that the recent season was genuinely disruptive — different from what the platform usually does, and better for it. But as a vehicle for building new artists from scratch, he is sceptical. “Mere saath yeh Coke Studio par zyaadatar wahi ja rahe hain matlab jab paise built hue hain.” It amplifies artists who are already built. It does not manufacture them.

Generation gap and what still frustrates an 18-year-old

Muzamil asks Umair directly how he feels as an 18-year-old in Pakistan today — not as a music producer, but as a person. The question is framed carefully: Muzamil acknowledges that some of the frustrations his own generation had at 18 — the inability to express themselves, the lack of space, the suffocating silence — have been partially resolved for Umair’s generation.

Umair agrees, but only partially. “Yaar abhi ke hisaab se to sahi hai. Kyunki pehle bahut matlab rukawat hoti jis tarah aap abhi baat kar rahe the… to yeh farq aaya ke matlab aapko apni liye khada hona aa gaya matlab is generation ko.” The ability to stand up for what you want is new. But the underlying frustrations — the gap between what is visible and what is rewarded, the limited pathways for people without connections — have not disappeared.

When Muzamil asks what specifically frustrates him, Umair circles back to visibility. He has seen many singers get opportunities. He has not seen producers get the same recognition. The infrastructure that would make that possible — labels, royalties, a performance economy with real ticket sizes — is still missing.

International audiences and thirty years from now

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Umair to look ahead — thirty years, to when he will be around 48. How does he see Pakistan?

“Behtar hi hoga. Umeed to yahi hai.” Better. He believes it. And in music specifically, he points to something already happening: Pakistani artists are drawing international audiences not just from the diaspora but from India, Bangladesh, and beyond. He mentions that Talanjum shared Spotify statistics showing more listeners from India than from Pakistan. “Wahan inke sacha fans hain India se, Pakistan se.”

International collaborations, Umair says, are already in process — he declines to name them, but confirms they exist. Not with the biggest global names yet, but the process has started. “It’s a start. International charge hoga scene.”

Muzamil wraps up by noting that Umair started at thirteen and is already here at eighteen. The arithmetic of what comes next is, on its own, a reason to pay attention.