When R.A. met her friends during the internet shutdown that followed the protests in Tehran last month, they were all carrying flash drives to be exchanged. There was nothing but music on the drives, but that meant everything to R.A., a classical music student finishing her four-year degree in Iran’s capital city. She and her friends found each other in cafes, exchanging downloaded files by hand, moving songs from person to person. “Because we can’t just stay away from music,” R.A. says. “We have to listen.”
She remembers sitting in a cafe where the owner put on a playlist that caught her attention. “It was different from the usual stuff,” she says. The music leaned older, drawn from Iranian artists active decades ago. Rooted in a simpler time, it provided a window to the past — a region that R.A. and her friends could escape to, and explore freely, in their hearts at least.
Protests in Tehran erupted in late December 2025 after the rial plunged to a record low amid rising inflation and economic hardship, and carried into January 2026, prompting widespread market and public space closures. Authorities imposed a countrywide internet shutdown that lasted a week, though connection disruptions still persist. The shutdown interrupted all communication between families and friends, leaving as many as 81 million people in the dark, and made music something that people had to carry physically. (Due to ongoing safety concerns, all sources who are currently inside Iran, or maintain close family or physical ties to the country, have requested anonymity for this story. Initials have been used to protect them and their families.)
R.A. felt the loss keenly. As a student, she studies, practices, and understands her own work by watching YouTube performances by artists around the world. “It’s really, really important to watch performances by great musicians,” she says. “So that you can get inspiration, different ideas, and analyze how they perform those pieces.” Without the internet, she continued studying, but had to find other ways to feel inspired, which proved hard in the current climate. “I could still prepare, but it wouldn’t be as good.”
When online access disappeared, her listening habits narrowed. She returned to music that she had already saved. “I only had access to the music I had downloaded before,” R.A. says. At the same time, she adds, she didn’t want to ignore what was happening around her: “I didn’t want to just disconnect myself, with all this disconnection in the country happening without our choice.”
During the shutdown, music moved through informal networks. Friends shared files, cafe playlists became reminders of a simpler time, and underground concerts and music-oriented gatherings quietly began happening. “There is some protest music that I have listened to thanks to my friends during this time,” R.A. says. “I was a shy student that mainly listened to classical music before, but now I am exploring these new genres like rock, and I want to raise my voice, show how I feel.” Her friends requested she perform a protest song they composed during the shutdown, but any attempt to release it publicly would have required anonymity, and performance permits were being denied.
Around her, R.A. watched classmates withdraw. “My musician friends got depressed,” she says. “They wouldn’t have the feeling to perform or to even practice their instruments.” They still listened, but stopped playing.
For B.R., who lives abroad in Vienna but had returned home to Iran for a three-month visit, the shutdown rewired daily life almost immediately. “Normal life disrupted,” he says. “We even use it to navigate. I cannot imagine meeting a friend or finding a safe place in this climate without having access to the internet.” When the connection disappeared, he didn’t even have a way of knowing his flight back to Vienna had been canceled.
He, too, turned to music. “I could go back to the songs that we used to send each other with my girlfriend,” he says. “I listened to some of the songs that we sent, over and over again.” Without streaming platforms, he relied on prior conversations and saved files and Telegram archives.
Much like R.A’s friends, he found himself returning to melancholic songs. “I was trying to have this meditation of pain,” he says. In those days of uncertainty, music brought back the taste of a lemon cake his girlfriend back in Vienna had baked for him before he left for Iran. The cake was sour, but the memory was sweet enough to anchor him.
After rearranging his flight and leaving Iran, he stopped listening to that playlist entirely. “They now have these new memories attached to them,” he said. “I try not to listen to it anymore.”
During protests in previous years, chants and songs had traveled fast and loud. This time, B.R. noticed something different. Before the shutdown, one song circulated repeatedly. “There was one woman,” he recalls. “She was listening to Shervin Hajipour, at a volume anyone could hear.” The song, associated with Woman, Life, Freedom — a nationwide protest movement that emerged in Iran in 2022 after the death of Masha Amini in police custody — carried grief and called for peace and freedom.
A.R., an Iranian economist and music lover now based in Germany, experienced the shutdown from inside Iran before returning abroad. Like R.A., he relied on previously downloaded files. Like B.R, he noticed listening habits became repetitive, inward, and geared toward self-soothing: “You listened to what you had, and then you listened again.”
A.R. recalls his mother posting protest songs to her Instagram stories during rare moments of connectivity. “It not only was a way of her communicating she was still there, but also showcasing how music fueled her need for change.”
Rana Farhan, a successful Iranian musician who left her home country in 1989 and has lived in the United States since, describes watching events unfold from a distance as a different kind of rupture. “Leaving was the only way I could continue working as an artist at all,” Farhan says. “But that distance never erased responsibility.”
Her music remains tethered to Iran, even as she processes events without the immediacy of physical danger. “These stories belong to a lot of people,” she says. “By telling our story, we are telling their stories.”
From New York, Farhan followed the shutdown knowing that what she could do was shaped by freedom others did not have. “We cannot close our eyes and pretend it’s not happening,” she says. “As an artist, you feel insignificant. The tragedy is so big, you ask yourself, why am I sitting here singing a song?”
That tension reframed her approach. “Music is healing,” Farhan adds. “But you cannot lose hope. Everybody is in a different place and has different responsibilities. We all do what we can. We have to.”
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One song in particular resurfaced for her during this period: “Choonie (Are You Alright)”, a piece she wrote years earlier that suddenly felt immediate again. “It’s very simple,” she says. “It just asks, ‘How are you doing? I think about you night and day.’ And that’s really what’s happening to us right now.”
For R.A., music loosened something internal. For B.R., it became a temporary shelter when all lines of communication collapsed. For A.R., listening turned repetitive and inward. Farhan talks about how distance sharpened the awareness of what could and could not be done from safety. For others, music replaced time and hope. Hoping that someone on the other side was listening, and things will get better.
Across cities and borders, music has been exchanged through hands, old files, shared playlists, and memory like a beacon of resistance and hope. In a country where people cannot always reach their families or speak freely, music has become a way of asking a question when nothing else would go through.
“In these hard and troubling times
In these hard and troubling times
Are you all right?
Day and night, my love
You are on my mind
And on this dreary night
Are you all right?”
POND Creative*
