from PRX.

This is Studio 360.

I'm Kurti Anderson.

Sometimes I wonder if we are at peak podcast.

There are so many out there.

More than half a million I just learned, and it being an audio medium, an awful lot of those are about music.

Podcasts about alternative rock, Broadway music, hip-hop, medieval music.

There are interview music podcasts, review podcast.

There is even, I'm told, a true crime music podcast.

But this interested me a deep dive into the music of ISIS. They call them Nasheed's. That's the

English term. Or Anashid, that's the Arabic, which is a bit awkward given those are also the names

for any Islamic chant, for songs produced by some of the

Muslim world's biggest stars. But the Islamic State has now released over 70 of their own. At first,

all these songs were in Arabic. This is the most famous, My Umar Dawn has appeared.

That is the British journalist Alex Marshall in the first episode of the long-awaited news season of the terrific music documentary series, Pitch.

Marshall is investigating how ISIS uses these catchy Acapala songs to recruit and radicalize

and inspire their followers and would-be followers, even though ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists

prohibit music.

The very meaning of Nasheed meant a religious song, for example, in praise of the prophet or in praise of God.

This is Benham Saeed. He works for German intelligence, something he's surprisingly able to admit

in public. And he's the author of the world's only book on jihadi music.

Pitch is the creation of Alex Kaepleman and Whitney Jones, who joins me to talk about this new

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