🎶🎤 Raad Records is less than two years old, fully bootstrapped, and partially owned by each of its roughly 20 employees. The Cairo-based independent record label, co-founded by Malik Tag (LinkedIn) and Asem Tag (Instagram), now works with artists from Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Yet the record label isn’t just about putting good music out there; it’s about “cross-border collaboration,” Raad Records co-founder Malik Tag tells EnterpriseAM.

Finding his own rhythm

Tag came to music after roughly a decade of working on other people’s startups. He graduated in 2010 with a degree in electronic and communication engineering, a path he says most Egyptian parents predetermine for their children. “You’re either a doctor or an engineer,” he jokes. He went straight into business development for an investor — inventor, a term more apt in Tag’s view — he met through an MIT business plan competition, writing pitches and patent applications. One funded project took him to Silicon Valley for a year, after which he had to head back home.

“I was still seeking what I actually wanted to build myself.” Back in Cairo, he joined different ventures as they came to him: a payments app that ended up running RFID-based cashless systems for Cairo’s events, and VOO, an Egyptian last-mile logistics startup, which he co-founded in 2017. Later came agritech: Farmed Here, in partnership with Schaduf, a vertical farming company that built hydroponic fridges for supermarkets to grow leafy greens and herbs — the first of its kind in the Middle East, according to Tag.

… But music had never been too far away. Naturally, Tag grew up loving music, but being in a strict household, the Tag brothers would find themselves having to keep their hobby low-key. “Music was always something we had to go an extra mile for growing up,” he tells us. The years would see Asem Tag co-found Vent in 2013, a Downtown Cairo club where many Cairene and regional underground and up-and-coming artists played their first shows. Immersed in Cairo’s pulsating music scene, Asem Tag began working with artists, eventually managing Egyptian rap star Wegz and setting up his talent agency TMTM Talents.

Asem Tag would often ask his brother for advice on processes and growth. During one late-night conversation, he asked his brother to climb aboard. Malik Tag agreed on one condition: he’d build the business his way, and so Raad Records came to be.

His way meant shared ownership. “I wanted to prove that a company doesn’t have to follow a purely capitalist model where a few people take all the gains and the rest are underpaid labor. This internal structure reflects in our company culture,” Tag tells us. Most of the people now at Raad spent time around the label before asking to join, he adds. Tag spent six months learning how TMTM worked before the management company became a record label, a structure he says lets the team put more resources behind artists and spend more time with them in the studio.

Bringing the thunder

Raad launched with Wegz and five debut or emerging artists, then held off on signing more. Demos arrived daily, but the team spent its first months setting up processes, infrastructure, and partners before growing the roster. Early growth was measured by how many artists, countries, and genres the label took on, and the team tried not to chase streams. The roster now covers hip-hop, pop, mahraganat, jazz, alternative, and sounds Tag says don’t fit a category.

Tag places Raad between two kinds of competitors. The majors have the money and the international reach, while local independents tend to be built around one or two artists. “We give what a major can give, but with the close relationship of an independent label built around you,” he says. For some artists, that means a path from debut to superstar. For others, it means a sustainable local career.

Raad signs artists mostly on the strength of their music, and Tag says the label exists to serve a broader purpose. “In our region, it’s about decolonizing art, creating art that is representative of what’s going on and the struggles of our own people,” he tells us. That purpose shapes the roster, which now includes artists from eight countries. The team actively looks for pairings across those borders so Arabic-speaking audiences get used to hearing dialects and accents that aren’t their own.

The projects Tag is proudest of are the ones he has worked on directly. Producer Omar Keif recently released the first part of his producer album, a five-track set featuring some of the region’s biggest emerging artists. Tag and Keif began building the album together years before Raad existed. Tag also manages Zad, whose project he calls “very personal and close to my heart.” He singles out Libyan artist Amaka Jaji as the one to watch and touts him for an eventual Grammy.

A shifting scene

Tag thinks Egyptian listeners are moving on from the hip-hop surge of the Covid years toward something more homegrown. Hip-hop reflects life on the street, he argues, but its sounds are imported, and audiences want music that sounds like their own. For now, many are finding it in the pop of the 1990s and 2000s. He points to Tul8te, the Egyptian pop artist whose nostalgic sound has drawn a large following, as the clearest sign of the shift.

Money is also flowing in. Major labels are investing heavily in a region where recorded music revenue grew 15.2% in 2025, the joint second-fastest rate in the world, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s 2026 Global Music Report. Tag says that investors are looking at the whole region and that Egypt’s size makes it central without making it the only market that matters.

However, very little of that money is reaching artists yet. Tag estimates that an artist earns around USD 4 per 1k streams in Europe and USD 0.20-0.30 in Egypt, for example. The difference comes from how streaming platforms split royalties based on where a stream originates. An Egyptian Spotify subscriber pays around EGP 50 a month, compared with USD 5-10 in the US, and ad-supported streams pay far less. Payouts are higher in Saudi Arabia, where subscriptions cost more.

“We can’t change how [digital service providers (DSPs)] pay artists, but we can diversify revenue streams so artists can be sustainable without needing 10 mn streams to make a living,” Tag says. He adds that artists also need better access to funding, international stages, and global collaborations.

Tag’s other goal through Raad, mentioned once more, is to get Arab audiences listening across borders. He wants Egyptians comfortable with Moroccan Darija and Libyan artists singing in their own accents. He links this to a growing sense of connection across the Arab world and its diaspora and recalls a childhood dream of driving across the region to visit friends in Beirut and beyond. “It’s time to break online and artistic borders,” he says.

Over the next few years, Tag wants Raad on the ground in every Arab country and wants superstars to name it the place where they started. He also wants the label involved in visual IP that supports the music. His model is South Korea, which exported its culture worldwide through K-pop and K-dramas.

He also wants Raad to show other founders that shared ownership can work as a business model. Every one of the label’s roughly 20 employees and its signed artists holds a stake, so if Raad makes money, everyone benefits. “People initially called it utopian, but it works,” he says. Tag hopes to eventually open the company up so other businesses can see how the model runs and copy it. “If every corporation made every employee a shareholder, you could eradicate poverty.”

Safe from AI

Tag isn’t worried about AI replacing human musicians. “AI might threaten other industries, but music will become even more human because it’s our way of expressing ourselves,” he says. In his view, the industry is still in an early stage of curiosity about AI, with artists and producers testing it for shortcuts. He expects listeners to eventually turn away from AI-generated music and back toward skilled instrumentation. When computers arrived, he says, they changed how music is produced without replacing instruments, and he thinks AI will have even less impact than that.

He expects music to survive no matter how the future unfolds. If it turns dystopian, people will resist through music. If machines take over all the work, people will spend their time making art — which is to say: music created by humans, for humans, is here to stay.