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Singer Sajjad Ali has become the latest to come out with criticism of Pakistan Idol, the nationally broadcast singing contest. In a press conference last week in Canada, the singer said the limited library of songs available to performers made the show somewhat monotonous.

Ali said the blame lay squarely on the shoulders of the programme organisers who had failed to acquire the rights to his songs and those of other notable musicians. He said “every contestant wanted to sing [their] songs” and that anyone performing their music “would win great praise and maybe even the competition itself.”

The rights the singer is referring to are copyrights, which grant an artist exclusive ownership over their work. These rights can be transferred, licensed or withheld by their owner, and any use of the work — including performance, adaptation and reproduction — without proper authorisation is deemed illegal under the Copyright Ordinance 1962.

Ali said he had been approached by the Pakistan Idol team for licensing but that they couldn’t reach an agreement over the financial terms of a potential deal.

He said a major chunk of the show’s library consists of songs for which rights were acquired via EMI Records, Pakistan’s oldest operating record label. EMI has the rights to songs from some of the country’s most prolific artists, such as Noor Jehan, Mehdi Hassan and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, as well as acts like Strings and Vital Signs.

Earlier, playback singer Humaira Arshad became the leading voice questioning the qualifications of Pakistan Idol’s panel of judges, asserting some more experienced musicians could have been asked to judge instead of Fawad Khan — the lead vocalist of Entity Paradigm, one of the defining acts of the Pakistani music scene in the 2000s.

So far, public reaction to criticism of Pakistan Idol has been largely dismissive, with many people just happy to see talented Pakistanis get a national platform.