Bandoora: A place for independent and local Arab musicians across the #MENA

bandoora logo

bandoora logo

Bandoora.com is a music discovery website that aims to disrupt the current state of music in MENA region by presenting  independent and local Arab musicians. The site currently has over 250 Band/Musician covering over 32 Arab cities and providing 33 musical genre.

We had a quick chat with Abdullah Al-Khaldi the CEO and co-founder about bandoora, and he was kind enough to share with the us some information.

What is Bandoora.com?

The term “bandora” originally means Tomato in Arabic, we have it connected with music by the spelling it “BAND-oora”. Following up to the term; the website holds “Music from this neighborhood” as the main slogan to emphasis the localization of its content.

BANDoora.com is a music discovery website that aims to disrupt the current state of the Arab music by providing unique and high quality content for music lovers presented by independent and local Arab musicians across the MENA region.

How does Bandoora.com work?

Each band has their own dedicated page that includes their tracks, image, biography, social medial links, musical genre, and you may also like bands based on the musical genres.

At the moment, the only registered users that we have are bands, due to our focus on creating a community of independent bands across MENA and actually build a database of music to present it to listeners, doing this allowed us to have 100% legal content as each band and musician on bandoora.com provided us with their tracks, biography and images. The website is still under development and more features will be created in the nearest future that focus on listeners.

Where are the bands from?

Currently BANDoora.com has 250+ artists that provided 1000+ tracks covered across all MENA region such as Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, KSA, and UAE. Covering 30+ musical genres.

Are you carrying out any offline events/marketing or is it purely online?

Although our main function is online, but we also have an offline appearance, we organized our first musical event in Amman, Jordan on the 7th of Oct, where we gathered four independent bands (ElMorabba3, Gazdara, Tourabyeh, and Tareq Aljundi) with 4 musical genres (Post rock, Rap, Oriental and Funk) to present our audience with different musical experiences. And because we believe that artists are not our customers, but our partners!

We have also media sponsored several musical festivals and events such as: Jordan Festival, Albalad Festival, Music freedom day Festival, Mashrou’ Leila event, May Nasr event and many more events.

Do you have any partners?

BANDoora.com has been launched in partnership with several organizations, including Jeeran.com, Albalad Theater, and Jordan’s No 1 station for independent music Radio Albalad.

Can you give us an idea of how the site is performing?

The traffic is steadily increasing each month, as of November we were able to get 59,910 unique visitor, and on  66,000 unique visitor in December and it seems we’ll be crossing the 70,000 milestone by the end of January 2012. A main reason for this is that our partners Jeeran.com are providing us with free targeted ads spots on their portal.

What are your plans for the future?

Our future plan is to support artists financially through profit split by online music sales, and subscriptions.

A big thank you to Abdullah Al-Khald for providing the information, we wish them all the best. Do you have any comments, let us know what you think?

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Having worked with top digital agencies and companies in the MENA region for the past number of years I'm now looking now to venture on my own with small side projects in online, SaaS products. Things I like include: gaming, sports, technology, social media, start ups, funny things and reading about new bright ideas.