Arabic-language commentaries and treatises on music before the nineteenth century dealt with music as an abstract and universal field of philosophical and mathematical inquiry. By the turn of the twentieth, such knowledge production had to contend with the growing corpus of European writing on the music of 'Islam' and the 'Orient'. In the context of the military and cultural expansion of European imperial powers, music scholarship became a crucial battleground. The musical practices of South- and East-Mediterranean societies came to be treated by both European and Arab authors as a key component of an Eastern, Islamic and/or Arab civilization. Depending on the writer, this music was either a marker of authenticity that could be mobilized to face the challenges of European expansion, or another field of backwardness that stood to gain by emulation of European technologies and technics. Relying on state and corporate archives as well as the Arabic-language press of the time, I chart the ways in which the physical movement of musicians, musical recordings, and writings on ‘Arabic music’ circulated the globe. In the first part of this paper, I describe this discursive transformation through an examination of the writings of such commentators as Lane, Villoteau, Mishaqa, and Shidyaq, as well as the founding scholars of the discipline of Comparative Musicology. In the second part of the paper, I show how that the discursive transformation described above can be partially explained by the changes that related to the commodification of music production. I argue that the national/civilizational spatio-temporal imaginary we now associate with pan-Arabism was at least in part the product of these processes of capitalist cultural commodification, highlighting how these profit-driven commodity distribution circuits furthered the potency and possibility of the Pan-Arab idea.