This article was triggered by a conversation with Jan Fairley, some years back, when she first put to me her idea for a special Middle East issue of Popular Music. My natural enthusiasm was tempered with some quite fundamental reservations. Was there such a phenomenon as ‘popular music’, in any generally accepted sense of the word, in Middle Eastern society? And if so, how were we to identify its repertoires, musicians and contexts? Could a useful distinction be made between ‘popular’ and ‘non-popular’ (or specifically, ‘art’ music) genres? And who, among my Middle Eastern music colleagues, would consider themselves scholars of ‘popular music’? As we discussed these and other such questions, Jan homed in on the truism that, for me, drawing from my experiences in Tunisian music, hit the nub of the problem: ‘of course, “popular” is different from “traditional”’.