Interviews

How Baloo Became a Central Figure in Saudi Arabia’s New Music Era

BYKhaoula Ghanem

November 28, 2025

There are childhood obsessions, and then there are destinies disguised as them. For Ahmad Alammary, the man the region knows as Baloo, music wasn’t something he stumbled into later in life. It was there before memory itself. “I don’t remember a time when music wasn’t in my life,” he tells MILLE. “I started collecting music when I was seven years old.” He was growing up in the Saudi Arabia of the 1980s, when music didn’t pour out of screens or radios, when record stores were rare, and the most reliable way to discover new sounds was to travel or to know someone who did. Yet somehow it was the only language that truly felt fluent to him.

Instead of toys, he collected cassettes. Instead of video games, he learned to time tracks on a boombox. He made mixtapes with cinematic precision, obsessing over transitions and flow. “I would time everything so intensely so that when one track ended, the next one started right away,” he says. “I had this storytelling thing going on from a very early age.” He didn’t yet have a word for it, but he was already doing what DJs spend years learning to master.

There were other formative moments too, little seeds that would later grow into something seismic. Like the first concert he ever attended—Stevie Wonder, in Massachusetts, in 1985. He was seven. “I waited the whole night for Part-Time Lover. It was the last song he did. I didn’t know anything else he sang. I was just sitting there waiting for this one song.”

Portrait of Baloo. Supplied

Even as he grew older and music became the pulse of his life, he never imagined it could also be his career. He went to university in Washington, D.C., fell deeper into the world of house and disco through his older brother’s record collection, and eventually taught himself how to mix on turntables. Within a couple more, he played his first gig. Still, he thought it was a hobby.

He returned to Saudi Arabia, working in advertising by day and playing at private parties by night. “I didn’t expect to have a DJ career,” he says. “Whatever I earned went right back into buying records..”

He eventually moved to Dubai, where a year of opening for international electronic DJs planted the roots of a reputation he never intended to grow. The gigs expanded from Bahrain to Beirut to European clubs where he showed up with nothing but a mixtape and nerve. He remembers Mykonos, walking into a club, handing over his music unsolicited, and getting booked days later. Even then, he thought of it as something that belonged to his night self, not the life he lived under daylight. By day, he rose in advertising. He was good at it—too good, he realized. “I was very adept at coming up with big concepts and ideas, but I didn’t care about the bank I was working for. Why was I doing this?”

Existential frustration pushed him into a master’s program in design management, where he learned how to build brands, ecosystems, and creative industries. He didn’t know it then, but he was training for something that didn’t exist yet in Saudi Arabia. That something arrived years later in the form of a phone call, received while he was at a party.

A family friend — soon to be MDLBEAST’s deputy CEO — told him, “I have a project that has your name written all over it.” The project: a three-day electronic music festival in Riyadh. The deadline: six months. He went home and began sketching the impossible with the early team. What started as a rough concept quickly turned into a shared blueprint not just for a festival, but for a full-blown music ecosystem in a country that didn’t have one. Together, they mapped out what Saudi’s scene would need: record labels, online radio, talent platforms, education, and an industry that could sustain itself long after the festival lights switched off. “It was a music desert,” he says. “We needed infrastructure, not just a festival.” That was the beginning of MDLBEAST.

XP 2024. Supplied

When Soundstorm, MDLBEAST’s three-day music festival in Riyadh, finally launched in late 2019, Saudi Arabia itself was still in the early stages of transformation. Cinemas had only recently reopened, music venues didn’t exist yet, and women driving was still a new reality. Meanwhile, the entertainment sector was quietly rising, projected to hit $4.63 billion by 2030. A cultural renaissance was brewing, but the festival didn’t simply arrive into progress; it collided with it.

The backlash was immediate. Before the music even started, marketing for the festival featured influencers and models promoting the event online. The outrage was selective and symbolic— the same global and regional audiences who tolerated music, dance floors, and nightlife elsewhere suddenly moralized it in Saudi Arabia, as if joy was allowed everywhere but here.

“People were calling us Fyre Festival,” Baloo recalls. He remembers the fear, the exhaustion, the moral debate, the feeling that all of this work could evaporate “in two seconds.” But then the gates opened, and people poured in.

What he remembers most were the expressions on their faces. “I couldn’t believe how many Saudi smiles I was seeing,” he says. One moment stands out so vividly it’s almost cinematic: a woman in a niqab breakdancing, surrounded by other women cheering her on. A surreal, electric demonstration of joy from a generation that had never expressed it publicly like this. “It was really beautiful to watch,” he says.

XP 2024. Supplied

What many didn’t understand was that MDLBEAST wasn’t created to import Western culture, it was built to make room for Saudi expression. In its first edition alone, Soundstorm drew around 400,000 attendees over three days. The momentum only grew: the 2021 edition went on to attract more than 700,000 attendees, placing it among the most-attended music festivals in the world. And as the years went on, the ambition scaled with the crowds. In 2024, MDLBeast broke a Guinness World Record for constructing the largest continuous outdoor temporary LED screen — a 4,800-square-meter monolith that lit up the desert like a sci-fi landmark. Even the festival’s main stage, Big Beast, became a record-setter of its own, rising each year into the tallest temporary structure of its kind in the Kingdom.

He never set out to fill a “gap” in the market. He set out to liberate something internal. “Expression, just joy, happiness, dancing, playing music,” he says. “I wanted people to be able to express things publicly and no longer be ashamed of wanting to be in music.” What he didn’t expect was a ripple effect—an entire creative economy rising in parallel. Doctors like Cosmicat left medicine for DJing, bankers quit finance to produce music, event organizers became entrepreneurs, and regional DJs formed audiences across borders. Saudi Arabia wasn’t just participating in global nightlife, it was shaping a regional one.

For Baloo, the biggest challenge was learning to let go of ego. He had to accept that he couldn’t curate the country to his personal taste. “I had to let go of my music snobbery,” he says. “I won’t sell any tickets if I book the artists I like.” But the payoff is bigger than programming. He believes Saudi music will soon produce a distinct genre, the equivalent of Romania’s Rominimal. He hears fragments of it in the local scene already, as do International artists. “Apparently we do have a sound. I just don’t think it’s Saudi yet.”

MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2019. Supplied

Then again, there isn’t much time to sit and analyze what’s already happened, because the next milestones are already looming. Soundstorm 2025 is set to return from December 11–13, expanding its footprint in Riyadh’s Banban desert. Early announcements hint at another supersized lineup, with global heavyweights rubbing shoulders with homegrown talent, a formula that has turned Saudi festivals into cultural exports rather than imports. Just weeks before that, XP Music Futures will reconvene the region’s music architects, building on its last edition, which brought together around 200 speakers, 150 artists, and nearly 40,000 attendees.

Baloo looks at the last six years and still finds himself stunned. “Did we really do all this?” he asks, half joking, half earnest. This disbelief is part of what makes his perspective refreshing: he helped build the industry, yet remains amazed by its existence. He calls it a cultural renaissance and insists that music is the missing puzzle piece that allowed everything else—film, photography, fashion—to explode. Now, MDLBEAST is no longer just a festival. It’s XP, an international conference; Balad Beast, shaped by Jeddah’s heritage architecture; Beast House and other hybrid venues with studios, clubs, and community spaces; record labels, educational platforms, and talent pipelines. “We’re building music culture in Saudi,” he says. “That’s the work.”

Somewhere along the way, the power flipped, and what used to seek validation now generates it. He smiles as he talks about how uninterested he is in Western approval, not out of hostility, but because the audience that matters is finally dancing in its own home, to its own beat. “I don’t really care about Western opinion in Saudi Arabia,” he says. “I care about my people having a good time at a party.”

And that, more than anything, is the revolution. Baloo is proud, and a little incredulous, but more than anything, eager. “We’re in a very good place, and we’re just getting started,” he says. “Next is more.”

How Baloo Became a Central Figure in Saudi Arabia’s New Music Era

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How Baloo Became a Central Figure in Saudi Arabia’s New Music Era

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