At events such as Riyadh’s Soundstorm festival, pop music is the new frontier in reputation-laundering for repressive regimes
You might believe we’re fresh from the biggest music festival in the world, what with more than 200,000 people having assembled in some fields in Somerset. We’re not.
Actually, Glastonbury is pretty much a minnow compared to the biggest music festival in the world. Soundstorm, held each December, attracts more than triple the Glastonbury crowd, but you don’t hear the headliners wanging on about what a life-changing experience it was. You don’t hear them mention it at all, to be honest. I only heard of it earlier this year, when the CEO of a big production company talked about his firm’s work on the event. The reason you don’t hear about it is that Soundstorm is held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Michael Hann is a freelance writer, and former music editor of the Guardian
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