Anghami Review: The MENA’s Favorite Music Streaming Service

Only a few tech companies have impacted the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as much as Anghami. Now, nearly a decade after its launch, Anghami is the leading music streaming service in the region, but is it still the best? Read our detailed Anghami review to find out.

What Is Anghami?

Anghami (“my tunes” in Arabic) is a music streaming service offering a broad catalog of local and international music to listeners in the MENA region.

The service was founded in 2012 by Eddy Maroun (the current CEO) and Elie Habib. The co-founders came up with the idea to create a MENA-specific streaming service on a ski trip in 2010. Unable to access their iTunes accounts, they were left with only one option on how to listen to their favorite artists: music piracy and illegal P2P file-sharing services.

According to Habib, music piracy is still Anghami’s biggest competition in the region, which is why the service goes to great lengths to justify legal music streaming as a worthy alternative.

Music Catalog

Anghami offers the largest music catalog of licensed content in the MENA region, comprising of more than 30 million songs. It has partnerships with local labels such as Melody, Mazzika, and Platinum Records, in addition to EMI, Sony, Universal, and other international labels.

From its launch until 2018, Anghami had a partnership with Rotana, the Arab World’s largest record label. The partnership ended when a competing music streaming service, Deezer, signed an exclusive digital distribution agreement with Rotana.

The loss of Rotana reaffirmed Anghami’s focus on indie artists, who can upload content directly to the music streaming service through a dedicated artist dashboard. In association with its strategic partners, Anghami also produces its own content under the label Anghami Originals. The co-founders claim that their goal is to provide an alternative to artists who either don’t want to or were unable to sign a deal with a label.

In addition to the songs found in Anghami’s large music catalog, users can also upload their own music and play it on all devices. This feature is available only to Anghami Plus subscribers, and all songs need to be converted into .mp3 before uploading.

The Anghami Experience

To get started with Anghami, you first need to log in with your Facebook or Google account, or you can create an Anghami account using your email address. From there, you can download the Anghami mobile app (available for iOS and Android devices), install Anghami for Windows, or listen directly from your web browser.

The desktop app provides the most feature-packed listening experience because it lets you upload your own music, play, pause, skip and control the volume from your keyboard, and activate a compact mini-player for a simpler view and better control over your music.

When you launch Anghami, the first thing you’ll see is the Home tab, with hand-picked playlists, new releases, popular music videos, and charts. To start listening, all you need to do is select any content that catches your eye and click the Play button.

You can control the playback using familiar control buttons located at the bottom of the app. When listening to certain songs, you can display lyrics or play the official music video with the click of a button.

Anghami provides several ways for you to discover new music. When playing a song, you can click the Play more like this button to instantly add more songs that Anghami considers to be similar to the one you’re playing to your playback queue. Similar artists are also featured at the bottom of each artist’s profile page.

When you don’t have any specific artist or song in mind and just want to brighten your day with some music, you can switch to the Personal DJ tab and play music based on your current mood, activity, or preferred genre. There are playlists for chilling, cooking, driving, focus, social gatherings, sleep, traveling, workouts, and much more.

Also worth mentioning is the Podcasts tab, which provides a fun way of learning about topics that interest you. The included podcasts come from MENA-based content creators, and many are not available outside the region.

Price Structure

Even though Anghami likes to present itself as a free music streaming service, it puts a lot of pressure on free users to purchase a premium subscription.

Free users can’t download music for offline listening, Scrub/Replay/Rewind in the player, skip as many times as they like, view lyrics for the currently playing song, or enjoy their music without ads and interruptions.

During the Anghami review, we weren’t even able to play a song without a pop-up window getting in the way and advertising 1 month of Anghami Plus for free. Judging by online reviews, there are many other users who have experienced the same issue.

With the free plan barely allowing us to listen to a whole song without interruptions, we took Anghami on its offer and signed up for Anghami Plus. We paid for the subscription using a credit card, but many other payment methods are supported as well, including Google Play, iTunes, PayPal, CashU, OneCard, Promocode, and over 30 direct carrier billing options.

The monthly price of Anghami Plus differs from country to country. For example, the monthly subscription in Egypt is $2.50, but European customers are billed $4.99 a month for the same service. Discounts are available to students, families, and customers of certain mobile operators.

Verdict

Based on our comprehensive Anghami review, the music streaming service shows that there’s still room for local services even in the global era. Despite increasing competition for local and international players alike, it maintains its position as the king of music streaming in the MENA region. As long as you avoid the free plan and purchase one of several available subscription plans, you’ll be able to enjoy your favorite artists and discover artists you’ve never heard of without any limitations.

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