From Shrines to Spotify: The Commercialization of Qawwali in the Digital Age
Omar Mehboob
13/11/27
Qawwali, a form of Sufi devotional music traditionally performed at shrines to evoke spiritual ecstasy (wajd) and remembrance of God, now reaches listeners worldwide through YouTube, Spotify, and corporate platforms such as Coke Studio Pakistan. Scholars have warned that this shift turns a sacred practice into a commodity, but few studies have measured what actually changes. This study asks which observable features of recorded Qawwali change as commercial production and digital distribution expand, and how quickly. Using a rubric-guided qualitative content analysis, it scores a purposive sample of 170 recordings (1970–2022) on five categories: Context and Performance Orientation, Musical Style and Structure, Devotional Markers, Media and Production, and Cultural Identity Representation. Average scores rose from 5.0 in the 1970s to 21.0 in the 2020s. Production-side categories rose to the top of the scale, while musical style and devotional markers rose more slowly and stopped at the midpoint, a result the sampling rule partly limits. Because the rubric measures recorded features rather than spiritual experience, the study cannot say whether Qawwali has lost its “soul.” It shows that the commercial infrastructure around Qawwali changed rapidly while devotional features persisted in more symbolic form, and it proposes measurable correlates of devotional function for future work.