Licensing and rights
Sandar exists because a great deal of Afghan music is not available anywhere else. This page explains where the catalogue comes from, how we handle rights, and what to do if something here is yours.
Where the catalogue comes from
Much of Afghan recorded music from before 1990 survives only as cassette transfers and radio captures. Commercial masters were lost, destroyed during decades of conflict, or never existed in the first place. That is the central fact about this archive, and it shapes everything below: for a large part of the catalogue there is no label with a master tape to license from, because no such label exists.
The catalogue is organised one artist at a time. Each artist's recordings are held separately, and every recording is attached to a named artist rather than floating in an anonymous pool. Newer material from artists who are still recording sits alongside the archive.
How rights are recorded
Sandar keeps a rights record for every artist in the catalogue, not for the catalogue as a whole. That record is what governs whether an artist's recordings are available to subscribers, and it is maintained by us rather than inferred from the files.
A recording can be withdrawn from the service at the artist level or the individual track level at any time, without affecting anything else in the catalogue. That is deliberate: a takedown should be precise, and it should not require taking an artist's whole body of work offline to resolve a question about one song.
If a recording is yours
If you are an artist, an heir, an estate, a label or any other rights holder, and you want a recording corrected, credited differently, or removed, email sandar@sandar.live.
Please include:
- the artist name as it appears on Sandar, and the track title or a link to the page
- who you are and what your relationship to the recording is
- what you would like to happen — a correction, a credit, or removal
We act on these. Removal does not require you to prove a chain of title to our satisfaction first: if a credible rights holder asks for a recording to come down, it comes down, and the conversation can continue afterwards.
Corrections and missing work
The same address is the right one for anything else about how an artist is represented here. Names in this catalogue were originally derived from folder names and some are transliterations rather than the spelling an artist uses themselves. Biographies are written from published sources, and for most artists in the catalogue no reliable published source exists in English at all.
If a name is wrong, a biography is thin or mistaken, a photograph is the wrong person, or recordings of yours are missing, tell us. Corrections from artists and their families are more reliable than anything we can research, and they are welcome.