Sallama was an Aleppo-based music label that lived through and embodied the full arc of Syria's cassette era. Founded in 1975 by Muhammad Rizq Al Sakkal and active until 2010, the company began as a retail and distribution shop before growing into one of the region's most significant cassette producers. Over the decades, Sallama built a vast and unusually diverse archive spanning classical Arabic music, Syrian shaabi, Kurdish, and Assyrian recordings, much of it reaching listeners across the Jazeera region and beyond through a network of agents whose connections to local artists shaped the catalogue. In this conversation, Yamen Mekdad speaks with Bashar Sakkal, son of the company's founder and a member of its team, who recalls four decades of cassette culture in Syria and its neighbours. From the early days of tape-to-tape dubbing and hand-cut cover art, to the offset printing machines, the failed attempts at copyright enforcement, and the slow decline that followed the arrival of the CD. SCA | Yamen Mekdad: Mr. Bashar, could you introduce yourself to our listeners who don't know you? Bashar Sakkal: I am Bashar Al Sakkal, Syrian by nationality, originally from Lebanon. I am a graphic designer, currently living in Mersin, Turkey. Yamen: Could you tell us about your relationship with the Sallama production company in Syria? Bashar: Sallama was my father's company and he was its founder. I was part of the company for a period, working as an assistant until around 2000 or 2003, when I left. The company continued until around 2010, then it stopped. Yamen: Can you tell us about how Sallama was established? What do you remember your father telling you? Bashar: Honestly, I don't have many details about the founding. It started in the mid-1970s. My father had a passion for anything to do with music and recording. He had a tape recorder and used to record concerts. Oum Kalthoum performed regularly on the radio at the end of every month, and he would always record those radio concerts. That's where the idea came from, to open a studio and start a company. But in the beginning, it was just a retail and distribution shop. Yamen: Was this during the era of records or cassettes? Bashar: Both, I think. Records and cassettes coexisted, but cassettes were already well established by then. Yamen: And after that he opened the shop and began selling and distributing cassettes? Bashar: Exactly. It started as a hobby, as I said. The first thing he sold was actually video. He opened a video rental shop first. He worked with video and cassettes together at first, then stopped the video side. It was too much hassle, as he told me. Too many problems. There were also other events happening at the time that required attention. So he left that field and focused entirely on cassettes. Yamen: How did things develop after that? Do you have a sense of what kind of music he was selling at that time? Bashar: In the beginning the work was fairly random, whatever was available in the market. He would find something, and make a copy of it. Back then the process was simpler. Tape-to-tape dubbing on a deck. If you got hold of a specific tape from abroad, you would simply make a copy, take it to a photographer to photograph the cover, print it on a colour photocopier or even black and white, and put it on your product. That was the cassette. It was an easy process. Things developed from there. Yamen: Was your father a musician? Did he play an instrument, or was he purely a music lover? Bashar: He wasn't a musician. He was a music lover. He used to record the Oum Kalthoum's concerts, he also listened to Mozart and Beethoven. He had a fine ear for music. It was his passion. Yamen: And you were living in Aleppo at that time. As a child, you would go with him to the shop? Bashar: Of course. That was the norm for us. When school was out, where was a boy supposed to go? He went with his father to work. It wasn't like now, with summer activities and programmes for children. Back then the father would take his son with him to the shop. Yamen: How did the company develop from there? Bashar: After a few years Sallama gained a reputation, and had built an archive. Then a fire happened and consumed everything. The equipment, everything that had begun to develop. But that incident became the reason for a new phase of development, in equipment and in production methods. Before the fire, production was simple. The cassette covers were made by hand. Some were printed at a printer, some were photographed. We would take an album we had, photograph it, print it and paste it onto the cover. It was a slightly tedious process but it didn't cost much. After the fire there was a decision to stop and move into something else, but fate kept us in this field. So my father changed his approach. The first thing he did was upgrade the machines. He moved from tape-to-tape deck duplication to copiers that could duplicate from one master to ten copies in five or six minutes. Over time the machines became faster and more advanced. The most important step was the cassette covers. We started doing offset printing, matching the quality of cassettes coming in from Egypt and the Gulf, who were ahead of us in this area. When we took that step it was a new beginning for the company. Production scaled up enormously, and the capacity to sell and distribute became much stronger. My father, may Allah bless his soul, has passed away. Yamen: May Allah have mercy on him. Bashar: In those days my father was among the most dedicated people I have known in their work. He was insistent that his archive always be complete. The archive was organised around the major classical artists: Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Wahhab, Farid Al Atrache, Abdel Haleem Hafez, Shadia. He made sure that archive, whether studio recordings or concert recordings, was always fully stocked and ready. He was a pioneer in this. Through that commitment, his reputation grew and his archive became one of the largest around. In those days there were no copyrights, so it was straightforward to bring in a cassette or album from another country and make copies to sell. There was no culture of intellectual property protection, and no body to enforce it. So step by step his name grew, and the archive expanded enormously. He had an Arabic archive, a Turkish archive, an Indian archive, even a Kurdish one. He may well have been the number one company for Kurdish recordings at the time. At the same time, he was a well-liked figure, and friends tried to direct local folk artists and singers toward the company. There were other companies working at the same level, some with better revenues, but what I noticed during that period was that the biggest distributors in the Jazeera region, covering Deir Ez Zor, Hassake and Qamishli, were heading to Sallama. Yamen: Where was the shop located in Aleppo? Bashar: At the Sulaymaniyah Telecom roundabout, right at the roundabout itself. For your information, the company was known for a long time under a different name, Ornina, to the point where most people knew it as Ornina more than Sallama. The name changed because someone in Damascus was using the same name and it turned out to be protected. So my father had to change it, and we became Sallama, named after a singing character in an Oum Kalthoum film. Yamen: What did the cassette change for artists and producers in Syria? Bashar: Cassette production was simpler than vinyl. Records were more expensive to produce and harder to distribute. When the cassette came in it made things easier for artists and producers alike. Duplicating and producing cassettes was a much simpler process, and that brought many more people into the field. Even artists who previously lacked the confidence to take that step now had a way in. They could perform at a party, produce a cassette at low cost, and put it out on the market. Yamen: What music were you personally surrounded by at that time? Bashar: Personally? I was listening to rap and hip hop. Dr. Dre, Eminem, Busta Rhymes, 2Pac. The complete opposite of my father. He was listening to Mozart and classical music. Yamen: Regarding Sallama, you mentioned it had a large archive of Arabic music but also Turkish, Kurdish and Indian recordings. Tell us more about that. Who was asking for Indian music, and how did you come to have such a strong Kurdish catalogue? Bashar: Syria has a large Kurdish population, and Aleppo in particular had a significant Kurdish community. They were a major component of the city, with many local and even internationally known artists, so it was natural for us to hold a Kurdish archive. The unusual one, as I remember it, was the Indian archive. It happened partly by chance. Some of my father's friends were enthusiasts of Indian music and helped him source a lot of it. And since he had previously worked in video, he already had a large collection of Indian films and their soundtracks. Indian films were genuinely popular back then, more so than American films in some respects. In Syria and in Aleppo especially, Indian films and their stars were very well known. That has changed now, but at the time people would come into the shop asking for a specific cassette, a specific film, a specific actor. There was real demand for it. Yamen: So your father effectively became a reference point for Indian music in the local market? Bashar: Exactly. His friends who loved Indian music helped him build what was probably a complete archive of everything available at the time. Yamen: When did Sallama move from buying, copying and distributing existing releases to actually producing cassettes under its own name, recording artists directly? Bashar: As a proper production company? Honestly that came late in Syria, and it never really worked. What you are describing, buying the rights to a specific singer and producing under your name based on those rights, that culture simply did not exist here. Everything was copying. There was no intellectual property protection at all. When copyright enforcement finally arrived it largely failed. We bought the rights to a few albums for Syria and Lebanon, including some of Omar Souleyman's work, but as soon as those albums hit the market other companies copied them and started selling. You could not follow up. There was no body to guarantee your rights. Yamen: But you did try to work within the copyright system? Bashar: When copyright enforcement started it felt like an opportunity for us. We would have preferred a system that worked. Because without it, you work hard on a release, and someone else comes along and copies it, the cover, the recording, everything, with no effort at all. Ultimately no one could buy rights for every artist. Each company would take a portion and work within that. Commercially, having rights would have been beneficial. The ones who lost out were those without the resources to produce or purchase rights in the first place. We bought rights for more than one folk singer in Syria. I remember Omar Souleyman, and another singer whose family name I recall as Jaburi. We bought almost his full catalogue, and despite all of that it was not worthwhile. We even sold rights on behalf of one singer to a party in Jordan, but within Syria we had bought rights for more than one artist and started production, because a copyright association had begun conducting market raids and people were forced to comply. My father tried more than once to protect the rights we had purchased, but it was pointless. You pay money for nothing. Another company comes along, copies the same release you bought, and sells it, and no one can get what is rightfully theirs. As the saying goes, by the time justice arrives, the one who was hit has already been hit and the one who ran has already gone. Yamen: Do you remember other companies in Syria or Aleppo that were working in cassette production and distribution during that period? Bashar: There were many. I remember Sawt Asia, Sawt Al Malek, Sawt Al Hafez, Farah Al Shammaa. Memory betrays you after a while, but those were among the most well known. Yamen: The biggest in the market. Bashar: In the early days Sawt Asia was ahead of everyone by a significant margin. No other company compared to Sawt Asia. But over time the others grew stronger, and by a certain point Sawt Al Malek, Sawt Asia, Sawt Al Hafez and Sallama were roughly the four strongest. Yamen: Comparing Sallama to Sawt Al Hafez or Sawt Asia, we notice that Sallama had much more diversity in its catalogue, Assyrian, Iraqi, Kurdish, Turkish. What do you think accounted for that? Bashar: There were several reasons. The main one was my father's passion. He always wanted his archive to be the largest, and that drive extended to everything. He was always keen for his cassettes to be the most beautiful in terms of printing and cover design. On the archival side he was always pushing for the most complete and comprehensive collection. Beyond that, his agents were active, and the Jazeera region, where most of our agents were based and where our strongest sales were concentrated, is one of the most diverse regions in Syria. Those agents, through their relationships with local artists, helped us build an archive that reflected that diversity. Yamen: How did the agents actually shape the archive? Bashar: There would be emerging artists making a name for themselves at local parties, and our agent, through his professional connections, would arrange for that artist to distribute through Sallama. He would bring us the master tape, and in return we would give him a quantity of cassettes and make posters, using the company's distribution network to help establish his name. This was before rights purchasing existed. The cassettes were the compensation. Yamen: So the artist received cassettes and posters, and you distributed through your agents across the governorates. Bashar: Exactly. That was how it worked. Yamen: Tell us about the printing side of things. You mentioned your father focused on offset printing. Did he have his own printing machines, or did he work with external printers? Bashar: Printing had more than one stage. One stage was printing directly onto the cassette shell itself, and another was printing the cover. The covers were printed at external printing presses, but the printing on the cassette itself was done in our workshop. Yamen: So you printed directly onto the cassette in-house? Bashar: Yes. We had more than one type of printing machine, different types for different purposes and qualities. The first machine we brought in was semi-automatic. Later we upgraded to a fully automatic one. My father was always keen on the packaging. In those days Syria had no copyright or distribution rights, but a cassette produced by Sallama was comparable in quality to anything coming in from Egypt or the Gulf. High quality in every respect, appearance, printing and the recording itself. Yamen: How many people worked at the company, and how did that number change over time? Bashar: It varied. Around 20 at some points, 15 at others, 25 at the peak. The maximum was 25 employees across management and the production line. Yamen: Tell us about the production line. Bashar: In the beginning everything was manual. Over time things developed, some processes became semi-automatic and others fully automated. On the printing side, we started with silkscreen printing. Then my father bought a machine from a company in Lebanon called Relax In, a well-known company that distributed for major artists. That machine printed with UV-dried ink, and it transformed both quality and output. Where we had been printing around 2,000 cassettes a day, that machine brought us to 10,000 or 15,000 a day, sometimes more. After that came something called Barco, a machine that allowed us to print on the cassette shell in more than one colour or even incorporate photographs. Cassette production was expensive, exhausting and labour-intensive, and because of that the competition was limited and the margins were good. Then technology moved on, digital formats arrived, and the compact disc appeared. Yamen: What about the archive itself, collecting and maintaining it? Bashar: There are many details, but the main stages were printing, audio duplication onto the cassette, printing on the plastic shell itself, and then packaging, putting the cassette in its box with its cover insert. Each stage required people and equipment. Yamen: Did you design your own covers? Bashar: From around 1998 or 1999 we started doing our own design work. Actually it was earlier than that. A computer came into the company in 1994, and I was the one working on it, though it took about a year before we were producing designs from it. Yamen: Before the computer, how were the covers designed? Bashar: It was a very involved process, but a beautiful one. There were calligraphers and illustrators. You would give them the images, they would cut them by hand and mount them onto a board at specific dimensions, building a composition. Then they would work by hand, painting in watercolours, mixing colours, writing the album name. After that we would photograph the result and use it for printing. Yamen: And from 1994 you moved to designing on the computer yourself? Bashar: Yes, though not immediately. It took about a year after we got the computer before I was producing finished designs. I was working on Photoshop Version 3 at the time. I was among the first designers in Syria to use design software. Yamen: You designed in-house on Photoshop, but the offset printing was still done externally. Bashar: Of course. Offset printing requires its own press. Some smaller operations printed in-house, but our production volumes were too large for that. We could not have kept up on domestic printers. Yamen: How many cassettes were you selling per month on average in the 1990s? Bashar: I don't remember exactly, but no fewer than 100,000. It reached 200,000, possibly more. Yamen: Did you have customers outside Syria? Bashar: Yes. Lebanon and Iraq, though in Iraq it was always through intermediaries and agents, never directly. Yamen: Where did you source your blank cassettes? Was there a specific brand you used? Bashar: There were several traders in Damascus we imported through. My father would import a container or two through those importers. No specific brand. Commercial cassettes, but always high quality. My father was particular about this. He would always request a sample first, record onto it, listen carefully and test the audio quality. He was something close to a sound engineer in that respect. People in those days used to call him a master of the duplication process. Yamen: Do you remember the retail price of a cassette? Bashar: One dollar. Fifty Syrian pounds. Wholesale was roughly half that. Yamen: The same price regardless of the type of music? Bashar: Yes, the price was the same regardless of the music. But there were price differences based on tape length. A 45-minute cassette, a 60-minute, a 90-minute. The longer ones cost more. Yamen: Which cassettes sold the most for you? Bashar: Local folk singers, by far. The famous Egyptian artists sold well too, but nothing like the local artists. The reason was that our distribution was almost entirely domestic, given the absence of copyright enforcement in Syria. If you tried to sell outside Syria you would face legal problems immediately. So our sales were concentrated internally, and within that, the focus was the Jazeera region. Local singer sales were much larger than anything else. Yamen: Tell us about your distribution network. How did you develop it, and what was your relationship with agents across the governorates? Bashar: In those days there was no marketing. Everything ran on reputation. Aleppo was well known as the centre of the music industry. Anyone who needed anything came to Aleppo. Agents who visited the city gravitated toward the names with clean reputations, companies known for doing good work and dealing fairly. There was no marketing activity from our side at all. We had our retail shop and our workshop, and the work came to us. Yamen: You mentioned distributors in Lebanon as well. Bashar: We had distributors in Lebanon, yes. Mainly for folk music that carried no copyright. They passed on whatever they could. Yamen: And Iraq was always through the Jazeera agents? Bashar: Always through the agents. No direct relationship. Yamen: Did you copy Iraqi music cassettes as well? Bashar: Of course. My father was determined that if he held an Iraqi archive it had to be the most complete and comprehensive one available. Yas Khader, Saadoun Jaber, those Iraqi singers. He could not allow himself to miss a concert recording or a studio album. Yamen: How did sales of Iraqi music hold up, and did the American invasion of Iraq affect demand for Iraqi music in Syria? Bashar: Honestly it did not affect it much, because we already had a very large segment of the Syrian population listening to Iraqi music. It is probably the most widely consumed Arabic music in the Jazeera region. Yamen: Do you have memories of the Assyrian music side of things? We noticed a fair amount of Assyrian production in the Sallama catalogue. Bashar: Yes, there was Assyrian material, though I was not closely involved in that part of the archive. We had Assyrian compilation releases featuring singers from Syria, Iraq and Europe. We had a large archive but I cannot recall the details well. Yamen: When were cassette sales at their peak? Bashar: The late 1990s and early 2000s. Yamen: And then the CD arrived. Tell us how that affected you. Bashar: It affected us enormously, and every other company in the field. These were businesses built on large archives and expensive equipment. The duplication machines alone cost between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, and we had many of them. A printing machine could cost $20,000. When the CD arrived, you could buy a duplicator for $100 or $150, a computer shell with a disc drive inside. A person sitting at home could compete with you. Of course they could not compete on every level, but they could affect the retail market, and since everything ultimately flows to retail, the damage was real. The barriers that had kept competition limited simply disappeared. Previously, entering this field meant confronting major obstacles: expertise, financial resources, time, the archive itself. The CD removed all of those. And commercial companies started entering the market with ready-made standard cover art that could serve multiple releases. Where we were forced to print 1,000 or 2,000 copies of each title, these new competitors were buying 100 or 200. That hurt us. Yamen: Did you work with CDs? Bashar: We did, and it went well for a time. We had decided to move into CDs, but then my father became ill. He had a heart condition and spent close to a year in and out of hospital, and the company stopped completely during that period. When he came back, CDs had taken over the market. So we committed to CDs, and the launch was strong because we were able to draw on the existing cassette archive, both the audio recordings and the printed photo archive, and use them directly for CD production. Yamen: You digitised them. Bashar: Exactly. And for newcomers to the market, if someone asked for a specific release, a newcomer might not have it. We had everything. But eventually even CDs became obsolete. Now a flash drive the size of your thumb can hold an archive that once filled 500 square metres of open storage space. Yamen: Did you get into VCD and MP3 as well? Bashar: Of course. Once the CD arrived the format of the content stopped mattering. Yamen: Did you have a recording studio at any point, or did artists always come to you with a finished master? Bashar: Our agents had relationships with various studios, and when an artist came to us the agent would take them to one of those studios. We were a production company, but marketing was almost nonexistent on our side. In those days the work was busy enough that you did not need to go looking for it. The responsibility for bringing in artists fell entirely to the agents. They would find the singer, take them to the studio, record, hand us the master, and we would produce and they would sell. That was the chain. Yamen: Did you ever consider moving the archive online? Bashar: We had the idea of building a website. There were sites appearing at the time, Tarab, Music, others like that. We thought about it, but honestly we had no intention of continuing in this field. It was exhausting and required constant attention. And as I said, my father's motivation was never purely commercial. He would sometimes work on things that made no commercial sense simply because he cared about them. In the end we decided to move into something else and let it go. Things are different now anyway. If you produce something artistic you put it on Spotify. Before, everything was more complicated. Yamen: What about Sallama's compilation tapes? Did you make those? Bashar: Of course. When we were young, each of us working at the company would make our own mix and bring it to my father, who made all the decisions. I would make a mix based on my own taste, and if he liked it he would put it out on the market. We did that a lot. Yamen: And did your compilation series have specific titles? Another company we spoke to used names like "The Fountain of Love, Volume 1." Bashar: Yes, there were those kinds of names. I used to try to come up with something a little different, finding a theme to connect the music to a specific season or occasion. That was my approach. Yamen: When did you leave the company? Bashar: Around 2002 or 2003. I left and opened my own design studio. Yamen: You mentioned the company stopped in 2010, before the war in Syria. Bashar: Yes, and even before that, sales had been declining for some time. I had been telling them since the early 2000s that this field was going to fade. When computers arrived that became my focus. I was still part of the company but I was concentrating on IT and graphic design, and gradually I moved entirely into design and eventually opened my own studio. From that point I could see where things were heading. Music was coming to me on CD and I could simply copy it onto a computer with no additional cost. Computers were expensive and rare at the time, but I was certain they would spread, and when they did, they would hit sales hard. I told them a long time before it happened: we need to change direction. Yamen: How did the company eventually close? Bashar: Sales declined steadily until the company could no longer cover its overheads. My father was a beloved figure, and for a while people tried to help, but eventually it was clear the field was finished and the company could not sustain itself. Even the workers and employees could see it, and they began to leave on their own. My father did not have the heart to let them go, so they made the decision themselves. After that he stayed on alone, working for the enjoyment of it. By that point it was not possible for him to enter a new field. He had given his whole life to this work, and his work had grown up with him. He continued for a while just for the pleasure of it. Eventually we made the decision to stop, and began selling off the printed materials, which were worth millions in practical terms. We sold them by the kilogram. Cars came almost daily to take away the archive and it still would not end, especially the paper and printed covers. The quantities were staggering, almost frightening. Cars would come, take a load, come back for more. Yamen: They bought it as paper for recycling? Bashar: Yes, for recycling. Yamen: And after selling all the printed stock, you closed? Bashar: Yes. There were also some machines. Towards the end my father had bought a machine at completely the wrong time, one that fed tape into empty cassette shells. He would buy the empty plastic shells, called Caesaro, and the tape separately on a spool, and the machine would load the tape and trim it at the correct length. It was one more step of development, making the cassettes ourselves from scratch, all in the name of saving costs. It would have increased margins, but it was far too late. Those machines had cost around $30,000 to $40,000. We sold them by the kilogram as well. Yamen: You sold everything? Bashar: Everything. Yamen: What happened to the archive? Bashar: The cassette archive was still there when we left. After the war started we got out, and everything was destroyed. It was all still in the storehouse. Yamen: Did you go back to check? Are you certain it is all gone? Bashar: There may be a few cassettes left somewhere, but the printed materials are gone. We had sold all the covers and printed stock for recycling before we left, so only the cassettes remained. I honestly don't know why he kept them, but in the end we left our home, we left our work, we left the company, and everything stayed as it was. Yamen: Is the storehouse still standing, or was it hit during the war? Bashar: It was hit and almost everything is gone. Our home was a villa. We lived on the upper floor and the company was below. At first it was all the company, but over time, part of it became our home. Now everything is gone. Recently someone sent us photographs. The cassettes were scattered across the floor, broken. Yamen: You are out of the music business entirely now. What effect do you think the war had on music in Syria generally, on the trade and on production? Bashar: The war affected everything, including music. But honestly, music in Syria was never really an industry in the proper sense. Outside Syria you can call it an industry, but here we come back to the question of intellectual property. Without that protection, the industry as a concept does not exist. You cannot produce an album for an artist and expect it to hold. Everyone who can goes and produces outside Syria. Inside the country an artist cannot protect their work. They produce something, and the next day it is on the streets. Yamen: Thank you so much Mr. Bashar. This has been a rich conversation and genuinely useful to us. Bashar: Likewise. I am sorry if there were gaps or things I could not remember. Yamen: Not at all. The interview was wonderful, and at the same time it opened some wounds. It also brought back good days. May Allah have mercy on your father. His work speaks for itself through the cassettes. Among the best in terms of sound, design and the cassettes themselves. Thank you. Bashar: Thank you. It was an honour. I wish your project every success.