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Khaleej Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Khaleej Times
This app changes how UAE can hire musicians, artists, and even magicians
For three decades, Nizar Ahmadi operated in the upper tiers of global finance. Now, he's channeling that operational discipline into a mission that's decidedly human: connecting magicians, DJs, dancers, painters, and performers directly with the people who want to hire them — without commissions or gatekeepers. 'I've been in banking for over 30 years,' he says in a chat with City Times . The itch to build in the arts, though, never left. 'Music and entertainment, since I was a kid, I've been exposed to it through my parents, through friends, which I had loved… And it's always stayed in the back of my mind. And I always wanted to get involved in it. I just didn't know how.' Recommended For You The 'how' arrived after Covid. 'After Covid, when tech came in, the idea came and I actually spent about three, four months just with a blackboard in my room, putting the user journey together,' he said. That idea became MADE — short for Music, Arts, Dance, Entertainment — a Dubai-born platform where creatives can post video showcases, set prices, be vetted for authenticity, and connect with clients in minutes. Ahmadi's frustration with the old discovery model is visceral — those fleeting living-room moments where someone sings beautifully and then, nothing. 'What about the 99 per cent talents that are out there that are unseen?' he asks. The premise of MADE is simple: 'Let's have thousand people looking at the talents that are out there instead of a thousand talents being seen by one or two agents.' That extends to access. 'I needed entertainment to come into everybody's lives," he said. "It's not a rich man's game.' MADE allows a hotel with a tight budget, a restaurant just starting out, or a parent planning a birthday to find talent at transparent prices, fast. 'All they have to do is showcase their talent clearly, where we have to do a bit of vetting to make sure that they do have a talent… It's free for them to showcase their talent and post a free video.' The driver, he adds, is livelihood: 'A person can eat. A person can pay his rent that night and they're exposed.' UAE as a launchpad If MADE's ethos is global, its launchpad is intentionally local. 'UAE is such a melting hub for everybody… it's the best place to come in because entertainment is growing,' Ahmadi says, noting government-backed cultural momentum and an events calendar that needs talent at every price tier. 'We've launched four or five months ago. We've gotten a couple of thousand talents to begin with.' Early on, the team nudged creators to raise their presentation game: 'We had to filter some and clean up some posts and send them messages to upgrade the quality of the posts… you're going to stop to the ones that catch your eye.' A mentor gave him another shorthand: 'Basically this is the Uber of talents.' But he stresses the role: 'We're not competing with anyone. We're facilitating and connecting talent to talent seekers in minutes.' For all the tech, this is still about human habits. When asked about the challenges, he takes a minute to ponder. 'From many, many sessions that we've had… the main bottleneck for talents, they're lazy," he says. "I need them to come and put a profile and put a video.' Clients have habits too. He adds, 'For the talent seeker, they're wary because they're so used to having an events manager… They think it's already vetted.' MADE's answer is to keep the process simple but rigorous: vet profiles for authenticity and performance, then make contact instantaneous. 'The connection is instantaneous… Here, the pricing is right there. You see the pricing, you connect, you can meet them in an hour.' The platform also serves makers through a second track: 'On Made, you have two platforms. You have a performance platform and you have a made to sell platform… it's not an e-commerce, it's a one-to-one where they meet.' That covers independent fashion, jewelry, sculpture — work you might see at a pop-up or gallery, now discoverable without a storefront. Commission-free by design On monetisation, Ahmadi is explicit: 'We are not taking any commission.' Growth, he says, is about scale and simple paid tiers. 'We're looking at the scalability and the numbers game over the next couple of years.' Because MADE doesn't skim fees, there's no incentive to 'go behind our back' after a first booking. 'It's futile… we're not taking a penny. So why leave when you have a thousand people looking at you?' That philosophy underpins the mission: 'The philosophy we've built it to begin with is two things, is to empower talents, increase their livelihood, and expose talent seekers to talents that they never thought existed or they haven't seen.' Early traction matters more than press clippings. 'We have quite a few people that were connected,' Ahmadi says. 'There are people that got connected after a day and there's people that got connected after two or three months.' The genres span 'bands… musicians, DJs, some artwork and painters.' AI: Filter, accelerate, but don't replace Ask Ahmadi about AI and he's candid. 'I feel sorry for a lot of the artists and musicians out there today,' he says. He isn't doom-scrolling, though; he's building. 'There's three things that I want AI for. It's to filter through a lot of the posts… AI is going to be implemented in the app in January, and what we're trying to do is expedite the connection even faster.' He also wants MADE to surface in external AI searches: 'People will go on AI… it will show you the top five searches. So we will strive to be one of the top five names.' What he won't concede is the core experience. 'We are blessed and lucky that the performances are still done by people… you still need that human factor.' As for 'future-proof'? He adds, 'I'm not going to say future-proof… AI is a must. And we have to incorporate AI into certain angles to facilitate and make the user journey easier, friendlier. But using humans is extremely important.' What comes next? Geographically, the expansion arc is clear: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, then global hubs in Europe, South America, and the Far East. Strategically, the platform continues refining the 'supply of talent' and the speed of connection. Emotionally, the north star hasn't changed. 'Seeing the smile on their faces,' he says of newly booked performers, 'nothing happier than when a person has talent and he's been discovered'. And if you're looking for the founder's identity, he says, 'I see myself as somebody that just wants to empower talent. Just to be a small bandage in this world to bring out the talented people out there that are unseen and unheard and undiscovered.' husain@ Husain Rizvi is a Senior Features Writer who covers entertainment and lifestyle stories and has a profound interest in tech (games) and sports. When he's not working, you can find him at the gym, or finishing a boss fight in a video game.
The Guardian
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Casually jaw-dropping': at an Edinburgh fringe of tricks and treats, Ben Hart has the magic touch
Magic is addictive. The more you see, the higher the bar rises, but the itch to be astounded is never scratched. A handful of magicians at the Edinburgh fringe have audiences queueing around the block, but there are more than 100 to take a punt on, in the hope that the next show might be the one to blow you away. In an unglamorous venue, Andrew Frost's tricks are not flashy and there are no dramatic lighting changes. But the tricks are phenomenally well controlled. Frost is a former woodwork teacher, and you can envisage him winning over a class of reluctant teenagers. He admits an hour-long show of card tricks isn't the sexiest draw, but his unserious attitude and impressive sleight of hand easily keep the audience entertained. As soon as you think you might know what or where a certain card is, he is five steps ahead and your certainty disintegrates. The show's title, Andrew Frost: The Greatest Card Magician in the World, is tongue-in-cheek, taken from a more hesitantly worded review. Saying the phrase weighs on him nevertheless, Frost determines to offload the crown to one of us instead. The key to a good card trick, Frost tells us, is to capture the hearts of the audience and then to find a satisfying way of finding their selected card. Simple. Deciding he doesn't quite fit the bill of the heart-stealer, he brings in a volunteer for a dashing finale, letting them, with their nervous excitement, be the one to capture our hearts. Aided by his delighted makeshift assistant, this is a solid hour of intimate, absorbing card magic. Ava Beaux puts more emphasis on the narrative for her show, wrapping tricks around a whimsical story of witches' familiars and dual identity. Performed as part of the free fringe, Ava & Beaux: Tales of Magic has moments of impressive mind reading, with a baffling trick based around a hidden squirrel. Flatter sequences rely on a ubiquitous shop-bought trick like metal rings, where the secret doesn't feel buried deep enough to be worth digging for. The story sometimes trips her up, getting in the way of the magic, and leaving little room for tricks between the tale, but her charm wins over the room. The standout section in James Phelan's show, The Man Who Was Magic, is a riveting stuck-in-the-mud drill with one audience member reading the mind of another. Even more fascinating for the fact that it doesn't work on the first attempt, it's a glimpse into Phelan's skill in mentalism, though surprisingly little use is made of this throughout. Phelan frames his show by weaving a slight story about dreaming of performing magic as a kid. With handwritten notes conjuring the idea of manifesting your future, he creates a sweet moment encouraging a nine-year-old from the audience to do the same. The rest of the show doesn't live up to the standard expected from the award-winning magician who predicted the lottery. The show doesn't stretch into the enormous space of McEwan Hall, with the audience in the circle largely ignored. He needs a camera for the more fiddly sections in such a large theatre, while some parts of the show feel as if they are still being road-tested. Phelan is a genial performer and deftly handles the trickier customers in the crowd, but something about this show feels blase, missing much of the buildup that comes before the release. With a predictable finale about prediction, the setup is fumbled this afternoon, robbing the trick of some of its power to thrill. For such an acclaimed magician, this show aches for more invention. Then we come to the queue that doesn't just go around the theatre but out of the square, over the road and into a car park. Ben Hart is a fringe favourite for a reason. It is common sense that a magician will only touch an object on stage when they are up to something, because every trick seems more impossible when even the idea of the magician's interference is hard to comprehend. Hart quickly dispels any cynics by letting us be the ones who touch, hold and shuffle. 'Look at my hands,' he reminds us. 'Watch my sleeves.' Overhearing someone doubting that he put an important object into an important bag, he does the action again, this time standing back and letting an audience member do the honours. The Remarkable Ben Hart presents a 'best of' compilation with sleight of hand, mentalism, card magic and other harder-to-categorise tricks. Hart gives us plenty of showmanship but doesn't waste much time inventing a story to neatly tie everything together, preferring to leap straight in with what we're all here to see. With his personable, waggish manner, a few of Hart's tricks are almost casually jaw-dropping. He acts surprised when something entirely and definitely solid disappears right in front of our eyes. 'Do you know,' he says, with a little smirk of delight at our gasps, 'I have no idea how that works.' A few of his setups are less spectacularly weighty than others, but the sense of wonder never wavers. In the extravagant Palais du Variété, Hart's production has an old-world charm, particularly as a mighty storm threatens to rip the tent away during the performance. 'The spirits are with us,' Hart jokes as the tent billows. You get the sense the audience would be happy if the storm kept us stuck in here all night. Andrew Frost: The Greatest Card Magician in the World is at 10 Dome at Pleasance Dome until 25 August; Ava & Beaux: Tales of Magic is at Speakeasy at PBH's Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms until 24 August; James Phelan: The Man Who Was Magic is at McEwan Hall at Underbelly, Bristo Square, until 13 August, then touring the UK until March 2026; The Remarkable Ben Hart is at Palais du Variété at Assembly George Square Gardens until 24 August, then touring the UK until April 2026. All our Edinburgh festival reviews
