When the acknowledgement of Pakistan’s soft power comes up, it’s usually attached to something official – a cultural delegation, a diplomatic gesture, a government-funded festival abroad. What it rarely describes is the far less controllable, far more convincing version: the world choosing to engage with a country’s culture on its own, without being invited to.
That’s what makes the last few weeks worth taking a pause for.
In August, Spotify’s editorial team published “The Best Pakistani Songs of the Year So Far 2026” – 50 tracks spanning pop, ballads, experimental music, reworked classics and hip-hop. This wasn’t a locally driven playlist or a diaspora nostalgia exercise; it was a global platform’s own editors deciding, on their own criteria, that Pakistani music had produced enough worth flagging to a worldwide audience.
The list ranges from Abdul Hannan and Samar Jafri’s “Khasara” praised for turning heartbreak into self-reflection rather than blame, to Asim Azhar’s “Tu Hai Wohi”, which reworks a 1982 Bollywood classic through Urdu, Punjabi, English and contemporary R&B, and to Young Stunners member Talha Anjum “Shikaar”, singled out for its international collaboration and layered production.
And then, a few days later, on August 21, Karachi got its own headline in the opposite direction: it was announced that First Light, an arena-scale electronic music event headlined by Swedish DJ and Swedish House Mafia member Axwell, will take over the Moin Khan Academy in DHA on September 19, what organisers are calling the first event of this scale, ambition and production standard the country’s live scene has ever staged. Local artists Bilal Brohi and Hazey open the night, and the production includes a section reserved exclusively for solo women.
Then, on September 7, came a number rather than an announcement: Coke Studio Pakistan’s “Pasoori”, performed by Ali Sethi and Shae Gill, crossed one billion views on YouTube. The song is four years old – it debuted in Season 14 back in February 2022 – but the milestone lands in the same narrow window as the other two, and arguably makes the strongest case of the three. Ninety percent of the official video’s views have come from outside Pakistan, well above the roughly 60 percent international watch-time that Pakistani YouTube channels see on average, and the video has been watched in more than 60 countries.
Why this isn’t nothing
None of these three events was planned in relation to the other, and that is precisely the point. Two are of Pakistani culture moving outward – curated and amplified by platforms with no domestic stake in flattering the country. One is international culture choosing to move inward, on the bet that Pakistan is a market worth the risk. Put together, they form a rough but real definition of soft power that has nothing to do with embassies: it’s whether outsiders show up as listeners, as promoters, as headline acts – without being asked.
The Spotify list matters because platforms don’t curate playlists as a favour; they do it as a bet on discoverability, meant to pull in listeners who have no existing reason to search for Pakistani artists. This undeniably says something about how the domestic scene now reads to outsiders: it is source material varied enough to be worth surfacing on its own merits.
Pasoori is the harder evidence of the two, precisely because it isn’t a curatorial judgment – it’s a billion individual decisions to press play, 90 percent of them made by people outside the country. A song can appear on an editorial playlist without meaning much commercially; a billion organic views, most of them foreign, is a different order of proof that Pakistani music is being consumed on its own terms, not as a niche export propped up by domestic streaming numbers.
First Light is arguably the most telling one. International touring acts have avoided Pakistan for years, and the reasons were never really about audience appetite; they were about visas, insurance, security assessments and the basic logistics of convincing an artist’s management that a show can happen safely and profitably. Omer H. Paracha, the OP Productions CEO behind the event, has framed it explicitly around that gap, pointing to Pakistan’s 240 million-strong, famously young population as an audience that has simply never had a night like this at home.
As he put it, “First Light is about showing the world what Pakistan is ready for.” That a promoter was willing to build a purpose-built stage, bring in international-standard production and carve out a women-only section as a baseline expectation rather than an afterthought is a bet on infrastructure and reputation as much as on demand.
The pushback, and why it is fair.
However, this should not be mistaken for a true turning point. One playlist, one concert, and one viral song do not undo a decade of promoters quietly crossing Pakistan off touring itineraries, and it would be a mistake to treat First Light as proof that the visa and security calculus has fundamentally changed. It hasn’t — it has just been navigated by one company, for one night.
OP Productions itself frames First Light as the start of a long-term platform rather than a one-off, which is a tell in itself: the company knows a single successful night proves little on its own, and is explicitly betting its credibility on a second and third booking following it.
Whether that bet pays off depends entirely on what happens after September 19 – whether ticket sales, safety execution and word-of-mouth among international promoters and artist management make the next booking easier, not harder.
Pasoori’s own caveat is worth stating plainly: it is one song, and its success owes as much to Coca-Cola’s marketing muscle and Coke Studio’s production and distribution machine as to any broader shift in how Pakistani music travels. A billion views for a Coke Studio single funded and pushed by a multinational is not the same thing as an independent Pakistani artist breaking through on Spotify or TikTok with no corporate infrastructure behind them – and four years on, the industry has yet to produce a clear successor at anything like that scale.
The Spotify list carries a related caveat: editorial curation is not the same as a commercial breakout, and being featured on a “best of” playlist doesn’t guarantee streams, sync deals or touring opportunities for the newer artists on it. Although not yet evidence of a pattern, Pasoori is the exception that shows what is possible.
Three directions, one signal
The fact that these moments landed within three weeks of each other, pulling in different directions, without coordination is what makes them significant. That combination is a more honest test of soft power than any state-run initiative, precisely because nobody had to be persuaded to make it happen.
Whether it holds as a trend or reads in a year as three unrelated data points that happened to overlap is an open question – one that will likely be answered less by September 19 itself than by whether Pakistani music finds a second Pasoori, and whether First Light finds a second night. But for now, it’s a rare stretch where both halves of the equation – the culture Pakistan sends out, and the culture the world is willing to bring in – have moved at the same time.
The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.
