Pakistani Music Sites

There is no doubt that Pakistan's underground and pop music industry is the best in Asia. We produce almost a band a day, with many singers by the hour. Much junk as it creates, you are bound to come across one good band and singer at least every other month! The result: a long list of really awesome singers and bands who are now catching international attention, from Bollywood to the Middle East, Europe, North America, and the Far East. Pakistani music is catching on and, as we keep stressing, can be our answer to Bollywood for promoting Pakistan's culture on a global level, if managed well!

Remarkably, and aptly, our young musicians and music producers are making full use of the Internet to get the world into the Pakistani groove. In addition, a lot of creative minds have developed websites dedicated to Pakistani music - featuring new releases, album reviews, interviews, and more. For those concerned about downloading Pakistani songs, please note that most, if not all, contemporary Pakistani artists have made their own songs available for download on their websites at no charge. So there are no royalty issues involved in most cases.

In this article, we have compiled a list of Pakistani music websites that we found to be the best, based on their cosmetics, content, and quality. We've also rated our user experience for each.

Look & feel / navigation ease

Muziq.net

Offers Pakistani music playback (no downloads). You can create an online CD (playlist) and listen to your selection. Requires a decent connection speed (have not tested on dial-up).

Muziq.net has a great selection of new and old music in audio and video format. We counted over 300 artists/albums and over 2,000 songs.

The sound quality is very good in most cases.

It also has bonus features like TV shows including PTV dramas and some excellent music shows, including tributes to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Noor Jehan, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

The main weakness we found in the website is its overall look and feel - there's a lot of information to process and takes a while to get used to the navigation.

It's a good site if you kind of know what you are looking for!

Pakmanzil.com

Pakmanzil is not just a music download site, but it is a site about Pakistani music and musicians.

A relatively new site, Pakmanzil has a jazzy interface and good navigation. You can play as well as download MP3s.

Since this is a new site, there are not that many songs available on it yet (107 MP3s at the time of this article in Nov. '06). However, you will find most of the new hit songs by popular Pakistani bands on Pakmanzil.

The bonus feature of this site is exclusive, original interviews with upcoming and popular artists. Other extras are lively forums, an up to date blog with gossip about the music industry, and guitar tabs to a lot of popular new songs.

Bottomline, this is a good first stop to check out what and who is new on the Pakistani music scene.

Pakmusic.net

This is a good site; is a web partner with The Muzik (Pakistani TV channel).

The site has songs, videos, a forum, and lots of news and updates. You have to register to access most of the areas.

The site has a huge library of songs available for download...but there is a fee starting from $9.99 to $19.99 per year. It used to be free, but because the site has over 67,000 members probably hitting it every day to download something new, they are forced to charge a fee (fair enough!)

Navigation is not great but if you stick around long enough you will figure it out.

Pakistanimusic.com

This site's navigation is really good. A clean layout, easy on the eyes, simple to find what you are looking for!

You can play the songs and create your "favorites" lists, but cannot download them. You have to go through free registration to listen to the songs. The site has over 200,000 members.

The song selection is really good, especially in the "golden era" section. You will find a wealth of oldies, from ghazals to film songs, right from Saleem Raza and Ahmed Rushdi to Naheed Akhtar and Mehnaz. This is the biggest attraction of this site as their collection was definitely the best and widest.

There is a great concept in the site to create artist home pages, but not all of them are updated. There are some good articles on Pakistani actors and singers but not too many.

The big weakness in this site is that the artists and songs are arranged alphabetically but the navigation is not alphabetical, e.g. you jump to songs 1-120 instead of all songs beginning with A.