Mixmag’s Industry Insider - Rabih Mokbel
Rabih Mokbel didn't grow up dreaming of electronic music. He grew up in kitchens, at his father's side, learning how to feed people at scale long before he understood it as a business. That instinct for logistics, service and an eye for what makes an experience work has carried him from a teenage waiter's job at Beirut's SkyBar to becoming the Founder and CEO of Venture Lifestyle Group which is now behind some of the Middle East's most audacious live productions, including sold-out shows in the shadow of the Great Pyramids of Giza and events with everyone from Jennifer Lopez and John Legend to Black Eyed Peas.
His entry into electronic music wasn't romantic. It was, by his own account, an accident born of stubbornness. Moving to Egypt in the mid-2010s, he asked a friend what the city's nightlife scene was missing. "He said, bro, electronic music," Mokbel recalls. When he asked about booking the genre's biggest names, the response was blunt: nobody could land them, and nobody should try. "I took this as an insult," he says. "What do you mean no one can get them?"
So he did what promoters told him was impossible - he booked Solomun for a fee that stunned the market, sold the show out, and broke what he calls the industry's "concept of mentality of bullshit", i.e. the comfortable assumption that cheaper, safer bookings were the only viable path in Egypt.
Ask him why he got into promoting at all given he wasn't a clubber himself and Mokbel doesn't dress it up. "To be honest, for the money," he says. "I'm a businessman. I purely like doing successful P&L projects." It's a refreshingly honest answer but scratch the surface and it's clear the money was never separate from the customer experience. Mokbel is emphatic that the two are inseparable: get the guest experience right, and the business follows. "The client is always the most important element in my business," he says. "I would never allow myself to be more important than the client."
That philosophy is most visible in his Pyramid shows, including Anyma's Quantum Genesys and Adriatique's X, events widely praised as spectacle, but which Mokbel insists succeed for far less glamorous reasons. "Safety for people who attend," he says, is what separates his shows from the rest, not just stage design or production value. "Some people wanna do something viral inside the venue, and they forget, if it takes you three hours to leave the venue, you've lost all the fun."
The Pyramids themselves, he notes, were "never there for this reason," and turning a monument thousands of years old into a functioning 20,000-capacity venue takes serious, largely invisible engineering including flown-in production managers and sound engineers who've worked Burning Man and major arena tours with big name artists, all brought in specifically because they know their game inside out.
Mokbel's roster of events makes for impressive reading but he's equally focused on what comes next. This November, P+US brings ARGY's NEWORLD live project to the Pyramids of Giza, continuing a run that includes plans for a four-show Anyma residency there in 2027 and expansion into Athens, Lebanon and beyond. Coldplay and The Weeknd remain firmly on his wishlist, alongside Rüfüs Du Sol and Fred again..., but he is also keen to help platform emerging local artists such as Cake and Z, Gawdat, Ashmawy, Abou Samra and help out promoters who operate one or two rungs below in order to keep the whole scene moving.
Beyond the concerts, Venture Lifestyle's 15-year partnership with Egypt's Ministry of Tourism & Antiquities, covering the Egyptian Museum, Saqqara and the Mohamed Ali Palace, signals where Mokbel sees the next decade heading: not just events, but stewardship. It's a long way from a Beirut rooftop bar, but the instinct hasn't changed. "Never to allow your ego to be bigger than the concert or the people themselves," he says. It's sound advice that has seen him become the most innovative and assured promoter in the region.
