Tuned Global, the technology platform used by businesses to power licensed music and audio services, has extended its partnership with telco e&’s digital entertainment platform Twist for another three years.
The deal will see Tuned Global continue to power the streaming service Twist Music as it expands beyond Egypt into the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Tuned Global provides the infrastructure “to deliver music experiences at scale” including tools for catalog ingestion, rights and metadata management, streaming and discovery APIs, search recommendation and tagging, analytics, and modular app components.
Twist Music, which has been downloaded over 3 million times since launching in 2022, is part of the digital entertainment portfolio of e&, formerly Etisalat, one of the largest telecom operators in the Middle East and North Africa.
Twist’s catalog includes content from major labels, prominent independents, including Believe and many local labels. The platform offers premium features such as offline listening, podcasts, broadcast radio, lyrics, Car-play and Echo for sound recognition and loyalty coins, with programmatic radio, AutoMix playlists and AI-powered recommendations on the roadmap.
Ahmed Yehia, CEO of Fintech & Digital Lifestyle at e& Egypt, said the renewed partnership would help the company “continue to deliver a world-class platform that blends international catalog depth with the local content our customers love.”
“We’re proud to support Twist in enhancing its music offering and driving regional growth,” said Con Raso, Managing Director of Tuned Global. “Our technology enables entertainment platforms like Twist to focus on user experience, while we deliver the infrastructure and innovation behind a scalable and future-ready music service.”
The expansion comes after MENA posted the fastest regional growth in the global recorded music market in 2024. According to the most recent IFPI data, the region’s recorded music revenues grew 22.8%YoY in 2024, with streaming accounting for more than 99.5% of the total.
But Raso said the headline growth figures mask a market still in its early stages — and that telcos are well-placed to speed up the shift to paid streaming.
“The combination of rapid growth from a comparatively small revenue base — and the dominance of free and video-led consumption — shows that the region is still in the early stages of building a large, stable paid-streaming market,” Raso told MBW.
“In emerging markets like Egypt, credit-card usage and digital-payment penetration remain uneven, so telcos act as a crucial on-ramp to paid streaming. Their billing rails allow users who may rely on cash, prepaid accounts or mobile-money to subscribe easily, without introducing new payment steps.”
In more developed markets like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Raso said, the value is different. “It’s less about enabling payment and more about reducing friction: instant activation, integrated identity, family or youth bundles, and strong local positioning.”
Tuned Global has previously told MBW that telcos see music as a “major passion point” for consumers — and view streaming as a way to reduce churn and keep customers engaged.
Raso said that relationship is now going further, with operators moving beyond simple bundling deals toward co-ownership of the music experience.
“The trajectory ahead is clear: operators want more control over the product, the data and the relationship with the listener,” he said. “This might mean a fully telco-branded app or a co-created experience with a local provider. But in all cases they want ‘catalog scale’ with ‘local editorial control’, tailored features and the ability to plug music into their super app, loyalty and billing ecosystems.”
He added: “Telcos are becoming entertainment platforms in their own right, and music is increasingly the ‘glue’ that keeps subscribers inside that ecosystem.”
“The most effective model is collaborative: telcos like e& bring reach and billing; services such as Twist bring local brand and editorial voice; and companies like Tuned Global provide the underlying streaming infrastructure, catalog delivery and licensing expertise.”
Con Raso, Tuned Global
A big part of Tuned Global’s pitch to operators is the ability to stand out on local relevance — something Raso said is hard for global standalone platforms to match.
“Twist Music is a great example: it combines an international catalog with a deep Arabic repertoire, bilingual search and an experience tuned to e&’s customer base, all tightly integrated with their offers and billing,” he said. “That’s very different from being just ‘another icon’ on a phone next to a global streamer.”
Looking ahead, Raso predicted that a big share of new paid streaming subscriptions in MENA will come through operator-led or operator-bundled models.
“They can experiment with price points (daily, weekly, youth packs), integrate music into wider digital-lifestyle bundles, and crucially, invest in local repertoire and editorial that speaks directly to Arabic-speaking audiences rather than simply mirroring global charts,” he said.
“The most effective model is collaborative: telcos like e& bring reach and billing; services such as Twist bring local brand and editorial voice; and companies like Tuned Global provide the underlying streaming infrastructure, catalog delivery and licensing expertise. That combination is what will turn MENA’s very strong streaming usage into a much larger base of sustainable, paid music subscribers.”
“When an operator finds the right product-audience fit, music stops being a peripheral value-added service and becomes a core pillar of their strategy.”
Con Raso
Raso said the technical integration between telcos and streaming platforms is also set to deepen, moving beyond billing and authentication into data sharing and personalisation.
“When you connect network data, device context, and in-app listening behaviour, you can refine offers, segment bundles and even tailor music discovery for different customer groups,” he said. “That level of personalisation is very hard for a standalone streamer to achieve without telco-level insight.”
He also pointed to a broader trend of “super bundling”, where music sits alongside video, gaming, cloud storage and other services in a single managed offer.
Twist Music already sits within e&’s wider digital entertainment ecosystem, which brings together music, VOD, gaming and sports under one umbrella.
“Telcos are uniquely positioned to be aggregators of digital content, and music is often the daily habit that brings customers back into those ecosystems, supporting ARPU and reducing churn,” he said.
