“Surrounding yourself with the right people is key to any kind of development or success.”

A chance encounter with a new artist named Wegz led to a fruitful collaboration that would ultimately yield great results. Together, Tag and Wegz found numerous areas of synergy and common ground, building a friendship and a professional partnership that would take them to new heights. Tag brought this same passion and vision to his talent agency, TMT Talent, and event planning organization, TMTM Live. With the experience gained with Wegz as a template, he sought to create a literal platform for other artists to customize and make their own, placing the artist's vision and voice at the forefront. "The idea was to get into the mind of the artist and see how they want to present themselves, how they want the audience to experience [their performances and music]," he explained. "We're doing that kind of same format with a lot of other artists, launching their live on-ground experience, so that when you go to a concert, it's no longer ‘Wegz performed during a concert done by this promoter’. It's just Wegz by Wegz."

As Tag emphasizes, "Surrounding yourself with the right people is key to any kind of development or success." At the heart of all his endeavors was a simple yet powerful insight: "You need to have the right collaborators, the right partners, and the right community." Through his tireless effort, he has built just such a community, one that embraces diversity, collaboration, and innovation and that will continue to shape and reshape the music scene for years to come.

Despite his instrumental role in engineering Wegz's career, he takes no credit for the artist's musical output. In fact, he attributes Wegz's sound development to his own unwavering creativity and desire to push the boundaries of his sound and explore fresh sonic ideas. "When it comes to Wegz developing his sound, that's all him," Tag says with a tinge of admiration in his voice. "He doesn't like to stay in the same place sonically. He’s always looking for the next fresh ideas, always experimenting, always listening to music from all over the world. He’s digging a lot. think that's why the sound is always evolving."

“I think why Wegz is more successful than his counterparts in what we'll call the rap scene is that he has consciously taken these steps away from rap and hip hop,” says Tag. According to him, Wegz's conscious decision to move beyond the boundaries of rap and hip hop, without disowning his roots, is what propelled him forward. "It's his roots and what he started with, but he doesn't identify as just a rapper," Tag notes. "He is more than that. That's why he evolved into that popstar status."

Despite almost single-handedly pioneering the underground scene in Egypt and creating one of the country’s most popular musical exports in recent years, Tag is a study in humility and remains dedicated to the collaborative process of music-making. Throughout his prolific career, he seems to have always sought out the underdog, given it his all to offer them a platform and dedicate his work to progressing a scene that otherwise may have remained stagnant. When asked what he thought his legacy would be, he took a long pause and considered the question, eventually revealing that he’s had the same goal all along, from his early days spinning thumping techno at VENT to managing one of the MENA’s leading artists: "I just want to do that for as long as can - help the sound and the artists of the Middle East go as far as they can reach on the global scale and export Arab culture to the world."

Tag's story serves as a reminder that even the most successful artists are shaped not only by their own talents, but also by the creative community that surrounds them. ■