Ghali Bouzoubaa

Senior Manager, Operations | Music Business

Ghali Bouzoubaa works on a problem most of the global music industry has historically chosen to ignore: how Arab music gets registered, tracked, and paid. He leads publishing administration and royalty operations for the Middle East and North Africa at Sony Music Publishing, based in Dubai, with a mandate that extends globally on systems and innovation.
 
The catalog environment he operates in is one of the most operationally complex in the industry. Decades of fragmented registration practices, inconsistent metadata across territories, and royalty flows routed through collecting societies that were never designed for the region have produced a structural backlog that quietly costs Arab songwriters real income every year. His daily work sits at the intersection of international metadata standards, royalty reconciliation, and the unglamorous infrastructure decisions that determine whether creators in underserved markets actually get paid.
 
He came to publishing through the commercial side of the industry. At Believe, he managed artist relations and label partnerships across North Africa with a portfolio of more than 150 artists and labels, and was retained by SODEC, Quebec's cultural development agency, to advise on market entry strategy for francophone music in North Africa. His earlier years across marketing and digital operations in Morocco, France, and Europe shaped a habit of treating creative industries as systems to be engineered, not just markets to be served.
 
Multilingual in Arabic, French, and English, Ghali writes on music publishing operations, rights economics, and the strategic infrastructure of the Arab creative economy. His central argument is that the MENA region's place in the global rights economy will be defined less by the talent it produces, which is abundant, than by the quality of the systems built around it, and that building those systems is the most consequential operational challenge facing Arab music today.