Encountering music in the Middle East has transformed over the past half-century. In Morocco, where once researchers traveled far afield, now folk musicians from across the country are brought together to play at festivals. Instead of rustic field equipment, the stages have professional-quality microphones and mixers. But perhaps most importantly, at the largest festivals the recordings are not made with scholarly or fan interest in mind. Instead, the various funding sources--government ministries as well as private corporations from Morocco, Europe, and the United States--have vested interests in these recordings. For example, the state-owned satellite channel 2M is interested in generating content for its broadcasts. Sounds and images that were edited and produced live during performances, projected onto large screens for the benefit of the huge crowds at the Essaouira Festival, later turned up almost unchanged on television, often months and years later. As the musicians and the fans continued to see themselves on television during the winters, they responded to this new mediation of their performances. They became more conscious of the camera crews and shots; of themselves as contemporary festival audiences and performers, and as future televised ones; of the qualities of sound produced by instruments and bodies; and finally of the potential advertising revenue streams that were opened through these recordings. Each of these areas--knowledge about the mediated self, aesthetic judgement, and money or profit--yields questions about rationality and performance: When musicians know more about how the final product will look and sound, what changes do they make to their performances? How do they adjust to account for stage and television audiences? How do they develop criteria for new aesthetic judgements? How do they manage expectations for income based on advertising revenue? Most importantly, what is the power of aesthetics to change subjectivities, particularly those regarding youth identity, and ultimately to change politics? More and more, as Middle Eastern governments find so-called "beach and antiquities" tourist markets to have become saturated, capitalist pressure to expand and grow leads these governments to evaluate and exploit the "soft" targets of tourism: folk music and culture. These questions indicate new directions in the anthropology of music in the Middle East that, while still mainly confined to the study of pop music and cultural studies, will become increasingly relevant more broadly in the anthropology of music.