How Anghami Is Shifting Brands' View of Music as Business
Anghami has appointed Elie Chammas as Head of Advertising and Brand Studios. The 16-year media veteran has a clear mandate: move brands beyond buying ad space around music and toward investing in the music economy as a long-term growth platform.
The Appointment
The Arab-first audio platform has given Chammas a role at the intersection of commercial leadership and cultural strategy. His brief is not to sell more audio impressions. It is to reframe what brand investment in music can look like in MENA.
Mission Media
Chammas arrives with leadership experience across media publishers, platforms, and ad tech. Nine years at DMS gave him an insider's understanding of how the region's biggest brands and agencies evaluate media partnerships. A stint at TikTok taught him how to shift market perception around a platform with no regional playbook. Three years consulting across ad tech agencies gave him a full view from the brand, agency, and platform side simultaneously.
"Nine years at DMS taught me how the region's biggest brands and agencies think, how trust is built, and how a media business earns the right to be a long-term partner," said Chammas. "TikTok taught me something different: how to shift what people believe is possible, at a time when there was no playbook to follow."
The Musician Factor
What makes the hire unusual is not just the commercial background. Chammas is also a professional musician. Anghami is positioning his creative experience as an operational advantage in understanding listener behavior at a depth that a pure commercial background cannot replicate.
"Most people in commercial roles see music as a channel with reach metrics attached. I see it as human behavior. And that changes the conversation entirely," said Chammas.
A Strategic Bet on MENA Audio
The appointment signals that Anghami is placing a deliberate bet on the MENA music economy as an underexploited category for brand investment. MENA was the joint second fastest-growing music market globally in 2025, with recorded music revenues rising 15.2% and streaming at 97.5% of total revenues. Anghami Studios posted a 200% year-over-year increase in commercial department revenue in 2023, producing more than 50 brand stories. The platform reported US$99.3 million in FY2025 revenue, up 27% year-on-year, with 3.5 million paid subscribers.
Mission Media
"From all three seats, the same opportunity kept showing up: the music economy is already a proven global force. In MENA, we're still at the beginning of that curve and the opportunity is enormous. That's what brought me to Anghami," said Chammas.
Anghami's Commercial Ambitions
Choucri Khairallah, Chief Business Officer at Anghami and OSN+, framed the hire in terms of where the platform sees the market heading.
"As brands across the region look for more meaningful ways to connect with audiences, music, entertainment, and culture will play an increasingly strategic role in marketing," said Khairallah. "His appointment reflects our ambition to position Anghami and our Studios division at the center of how brands engage with culture in the region."
The appointment puts a specialist with platform-side, agency-side, and brand-side experience in the room when Anghami pitches its Studios division, a signal the company is serious about shifting the conversation around audio from reach metrics to cultural equity.
