When Egypt’s Musicians’ Syndicate was established in 1944, thanks in part to the efforts of singer Umm Kulthum, it was envisaged as a way to provide musicians with material support including healthcare, pensions, and help securing employment. Although the Syndicate continues to provide these services, in recent years it has hit the headlines instead for its increasingly spectacular policing of Egypt’s music scene: it has fined and arrested numerous musicians it deems to be threatening public taste, and even tried to ban an entire genre (mahraganat) in the name of preserving the country’s musical heritage. Using press sources, documents from the Syndicate, and ethnographic fieldwork with musicians and Syndicate officials in Cairo (2018-2023), this paper traces transformations in the Syndicate’s role and remit from the 1940s to the early 2020s, focusing on the shifting balance between its two functions: providing welfare, and excluding certain musicians and styles. I show that these two functions have always gone hand in hand, increasing in tandem at certain historical junctures. Since the 1950s, fines and levies against non-members have been used to fund members’ welfare provisions, and the violent exclusion of novel musical styles ensures continued employment for older, more established musicians who constitute the Syndicate’s main member base. Contrary to scholarship that suggests the Syndicate is increasingly interventionist, I show that the Syndicate has always been invested in policing the boundaries of the musical profession in ways that exclude certain (often already marginalised) artists. Drawing on recent scholarship on music-making in Egypt (Sprengel 2019, 2020; Karawya 2022; Simon 2022), I argue that historicising the actions of the present-day Syndicate can help us better understand its central role in shaping the country’s music scene, as well as illuminating the realities of cultural production under conditions of authoritarianism. I also draw on broader writing on the role of professional associations (al-niqābāt al-mihaniyya) in Egypt (Springborg 1978; Pollard 2014; Longueness and Monciaud 2011), to consider how these associations (the Musicians’ Syndicate included) function to compensate for the limits of the welfare state through their self-funded welfare provision programmes.