A visit to the Soundstorm festival offers a window into the country’s fast-changing culture — and the questions facing artists and fans who attend.

AA billboard along the four-lane highway that runs from King Khalid International Airport across the desert into Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, features the smiling faces of the kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz, and its current ruler, King Salman, as well as the stoic visage of a third, Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia, colloquially known as MBS. “Our real wealth,” the sign reads in Arabic as well as English, “is in the ambition of our people.”

A second billboard advertises the event I’m here to see and features the images of another three men who could, in their own way, be important to the future of the rapidly changing country: Marshmello, David Guetta and DJ Khaled. They are among the hundreds of artists who in 2022 flew in from around the world to perform at Riyadh’s third annual Soundstorm, a dance music-focused mega-festival that drew over 150,000 people a day, including myself, to a site the size of Coachella.

This year, the festival is drawing more superstars to the region, with Eminem, U.K. rock legends Muse, Jared Leto’s band Thirty Seconds to Mars and dance titans Richie Hawtin and Marco Carola set to headline Soundstorm 2024 this Dec. 12-14. Many more acts will be announced in the coming weeks, with this fifth edition of the festival marking the first time all of these phase-one artists, outside Carola, will perform in the country.

Another act that made its Saudi Arabia debut at Soundstorm is Metallica. At the 2023 festival this past December, flames shot from the festival’s massive main stage — dubbed “Big Beast” — into the cold desert air as singer James Hetfield demanded, “Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire!,” while the crowd roared. Like the country’s electronic scene, the Saudi Arabian metal community once existed entirely underground, with secret shows held at empty highway rest stations. In this new era of Saudi history, Soundstorm drew one of the genre’s most popular bands of all time to Riyadh. In the crowd, fans made devil horns with their hands and thrust them into the night sky as Hetfield yelled, “Burn, Riyadh, burn!”

This past December, Soundstorm — its scale matched only by long-standing dance festivals like Tomorrowland and EDC Las Vegas — also featured headliners including Guetta, Calvin Harris, Will Smith, 50 Cent, Swedish House Mafia, H.E.R., Travis Scott and J Balvin, and followed an annual industry conference, XP Music Futures, that featured a mix of global and local music executives discussing artificial intelligence, emerging artists, climate action and more.

In May, the festival’s parent company, MDLBEAST, kicked off a series of daylong workshops for groups of roughly 30 people from the local music scenes in Kuwait, Tunisia, Oman and Saudi (last year, they also hosted workshops featuring a music production course by Afrojack and a primer on artist management), and they’re gearing up for the next XP conference ahead of the December 2024 festival.

MDLBEAST, which is leading the charge on music-related endeavors in Saudi, also operates a members-only club in Riyadh similar to the Soho House — Beast House, which also features a recording studio — and a Riyadh nightclub, Attaché. Saudi’s first opera house is currently under construction nearby, with an arena and art museum also forthcoming.

Riyadh, Saudi ArabiaJohnny Greig/Getty Images

British DJ-event producer Megatronic, whose Femme Fest event hosts shows by female-identifying artists and has been at the conference since its first year, says the event “is going to grow and be an important part of the fabric for the Gulf Region in terms of putting music out to the rest of the world.” She says international music industry figures have been moving to Saudi Arabia from Dubai, United Arab Emirates — where she also lived for six years — because “Saudi is fresh; it’s vibrant compared to Dubai… in 10 years, it might squash Dubai.” It’s also possible that with war affecting Israel’s position as the Middle East’s leading dance music destination, Saudi Arabia could rise up in its place.

This was all inconceivable less than a decade ago, when playing music in public was punishable by the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Activities like dancing, public hugging and gender mixing were also prohibited until bin Salman stripped the religious police of much of their authority when he rose to power around 2016 and launched his national development project known as Vision 2030.

As part of that plan, Saudi Arabia has been working to broaden its economy from oil dependency — the state-run ARAMCO posted $121 billion in profit in 2023 — to encompass businesses like sports, technology, tourism and media and culture. That includes entering the music business, which the country is doing the way it does everything: fast and on a grand scale, with no expense spared.

In 2018, Saudi’s General Entertainment Authority announced plans to invest $64 billion — more than double the value of the entire global music industry in 2023, according to the 2024 IFPI Global Report — into entertainment over the next decade. In 2020, the country formally launched the Saudi Music Commission, with British music trade association executive Paul Pacifico joining as CEO in January 2023.

The hope is that Saudi Arabia will develop a music business that can generate jobs, turn regional artists into stars, help the country present a more modern face to the world and unlock the Middle East as music’s next big growth market.