In this talk I formulate and apply a network analysis methodology for understanding the history of song on Egyptian radio, then link social network history to the wider history of Egypt. Music is a massively relational cultural form, involving interactions among composers, poets, arrangers, conductors, and performers, among others. The reality of music history thus emerges as a complex network of relationships, unfolding and changing over time. Song production, in particular, centers on poet-composer-singer collaborations. Most Arab music histories narrate lives of the biggest stars, presented in historical and cultural context, but neglecting the broader network of productive relationships. However many important musical figures are not celebrities, and the full complexity of the non-linear network can only be grasped holistically, via big-data empirical analysis, not pointillistically through the prevailing case studies of celebrities. Such holistic analysis reveals surprising emergent, structural patterns that are not apparent in any single narrative. Social network analysis (SNA) offers a powerful suite of tools enabling such an approach, including metrics for centrality and the detection of cohesive subgroups, analogous to the “invisible colleges” of scientists that de Solla Price (1963) discovered through examination of citation networks. Starting with a large dataset of tracks broadcast on Egyptian radio, including the poet, composer, and singer for each, I extract a network of poet-composer-singer collaborations, then apply SNA algorithms to reveal its social structure. Next, I interpret that structure in light of wider socio-cultural and historical factors in Egypt's modern history, relating patterns in the structures of collaboration to dominating political, economic, and media institutions (a) pre-independence, during a relatively freewheeling media period; (b) under Nasserist socialism, when state control of media was most total; and (c) in the subsequent infitah period with gradual loosening of media controls. My talk both sheds light on Egypt's musical history, and supplies a model and method that may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to other geocultural domains.