Anghami Paid Amr Diab $10 Million for Exclusivity in 2022. The Contract Collapsed to $1 Million by 2023, Then Sony Acquired His Catalogue.

In February 2022 the streaming platform Anghami signed Egyptian singer Amr Diab to a three-year global exclusivity contract it valued, in its own words, at “a $10 million exclusive deal.” Fifteen months later, Anghami’s own filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission show that contract being terminated and rewritten into a much smaller one, worth $1,000,000 and running about thirteen months. In October 2024, four months after that rewritten contract’s stated end date, Sony Music Entertainment Middle East announced it had acquired Diab’s recorded music catalogue. No party has disclosed what Sony paid.

What Anghami told the SEC in 2022

Anghami Inc, the Abu Dhabi-headquartered, Nasdaq-listed streaming company, files an annual Form 20-F with the SEC. Its filing for fiscal year 2022, filed 16 May 2023, describes an agreement signed that February: “Anghami signed an exclusive partnership with Amr Diab, the largest artist in MENA with more than 22 million followers on social media and 1 billion streams per year. Amr Diab owned content will not be available on any other streaming platform for the duration of the contract. In addition, he will create three original albums to be streamed exclusively on Anghami.” A separate passage in the same filing describes Anghami becoming “the sole distributor of Amr Diab content globally, for the next three years.” The cost is stated plainly in the section explaining a jump in expenses: “the expenses from the exclusivity deal signed in February 2022 with Amr Diab, one of the MENA region’s leading artists (a $10 million exclusive deal covering a period of 3 years where Anghami obtains exclusivity over Amr Diab’s entire music catalogue).”

Every verb in that filing is a distribution and streaming verb: exclusively streams, sole distributor, will not be available on any other platform. None of it is a sale. Anghami capitalised the arrangement as an intangible asset on its balance sheet, which is standard treatment for a long-term content contract, not evidence of a change in who owns Diab’s masters.

The rewrite: from three years and $10 million to thirteen months and $1 million

Anghami’s Form 20-F for fiscal year 2023, filed 29 April 2024, tells a different story about the same relationship, in two places that do not quite agree with each other. In the business narrative, the company describes 18 May 2023 as an expansion: “Anghami expanded its flagship exclusive agreement with Amr Diab by adding 4 live concerts covering several key cities across the MENA region.” In the audited financial statements of the same filing, a footnote to intangible assets describes the same date as something closer to a wind-down: “The net book value amounting to USD 5,053,604 represent the terminated contract with Amr Diab, wherein the related outstanding payable of the Group to Amr Diab as of the date of amendment amounting to USD 5,250,000 is forfeited, the net transaction resulted in a gain of USD 196,396 recorded under other income. A new contract was signed with the artist dated May 18, 2023. Based on the new contract, a total amount of USD 1,000,000 is recorded as an intangible asset and the contract period will end on June 1, 2024.”

Read together, the two passages describe the same transaction two ways. The original three-year, $10 million exclusivity contract was written off, with more than five million dollars in unpaid obligations to Diab cancelled in the process, and replaced with a new one covering roughly thirteen months at a tenth of the stated original value, while four live concerts were added on top. Anghami’s later filings confirm the concerts were real and were delivered over an extended period: the Form 20-F for fiscal year 2024 says the arrangement “granted Anghami exclusive rights to his catalog and four live concerts, three of which have been successfully executed, with one still to come,” and names an Egypt concert as the sole live event of 2024. The fiscal year 2025 filing, filed 30 April 2026, places the final concert in Abu Dhabi in April 2025 and separately notes “the absence of amortization related to the Amr Diab deal, which concluded in 2024.” The recording-catalogue exclusivity and the live-events obligation therefore ran on different clocks, and the word “concluded” in the newest filing refers to the amortisation schedule on the intangible asset, not to a specific end date that any filing states outright.

Then Sony announced an acquisition, and did not name a price

On 31 October 2024, Sony Music Entertainment Middle East announced what its outside counsel, Bracewell LLP, called in its own release “the first of its kind for a music catalogue acquisition for an artist in the Middle East region.” The announcement, carried the same day in trade press and posted to Diab’s own website on 1 November 2024, describes “acquiring rights to Amr Diab’s extensive music catalogue, featuring hits like Inta El Haz, Zay Manty and Ya Ana Ya La” alongside “a forward-looking multi-album deal.” Shridhar Subramaniam, President of Asia and Middle East for Sony Music, and Rami Mohsen, Managing Director of Sony Music Entertainment Middle East, were both quoted; so was Diab, who called it “this new chapter” of his career. Anghami’s own FY2024 filing, filed six months later, refers back to the Anghami arrangement as “our multi-year deal with Amr Diab (prior to his recent agreement with Sony).”

Nowhere in these documents does a number appear for what Sony paid. Nor do they state whether the acquisition covers the copyright in the master recordings outright or a long-term exclusive right dressed in acquisition language, though “acquisition” and “acquiring rights to” are the words all four independently use, terms Anghami’s own filings never apply to its different 2022 arrangement.

A label called Nay, and a claim this desk could not confirm

One further complication sits underneath all of this. A regional entertainment site covering Diab’s return to major streaming platforms after the Sony deal wrote that “this exciting return follows an absence that began in early 2022 when Diab signed an exclusive deal with Anghami. As a result, albums released under his label, Nay, were removed from platforms.” That is the only place among the sources checked for this piece that names a company as the owner of the withdrawn albums. Anghami’s own SEC filings never make that claim; they describe “Amr Diab owned content” as the subject of the 2022 contract, naming the artist, not a company. Sony’s announcement, Bracewell’s release and Diab’s own site describe Sony as acquiring Diab’s catalogue, again naming the artist, not a company.

Anghami’s filings do independently name a company called Nay for Media. Every one of Anghami’s Form 20-F filings from fiscal year 2021 through fiscal year 2024 lists it among the region’s largest labels, alongside Rotana, Qanawat, Watary and Platinum Record, under a general licence agreement that provides Anghami “digital rights on behalf of prominent Arabic artists.” Nothing in that description ties Nay for Media specifically to Amr Diab, and nothing in any Diab-specific document names Nay for Media at all. Whether the “Nay” in the trade report and the “Nay for Media” in Anghami’s licensing disclosures are the same company, and whether either one held any rights in Diab’s recordings, could not be established from the sources reviewed.

What could not be established

No financial term of the Sony acquisition is public: no price, no royalty structure, no term length beyond “global” appears anywhere. Sony Music Entertainment has not published its own newsroom account of the deal that this desk could locate, and sonymusic.com returns an access error to requests from this server; every fact about the Sony side of this story comes from its outside counsel, trade reporting and the artist’s own website, not from Sony itself. Whether the acquisition covers a full transfer of copyright or a very long exclusive licence could not be confirmed. The identity, ownership and any relationship to Diab of the company or companies called “Nay” and “Nay for Media” could not be established. And no filing gives a single, agreed end date for the Anghami relationship: the rewritten 2023 contract was set to run to June 2024, the catalogue and concert rights are described as “concluded” sometime that same year, and the last of the four concerts was delivered in April 2025.

What this means for artists

If you are an artist offered a multi-year exclusivity contract by a streaming platform, the number attached to it on day one is not a guarantee. Diab’s initial agreement was booked at $10 million over three years; within fifteen months, by Anghami’s own accounting, the unpaid balance owed to him was forfeited and the contract was replaced with one worth a tenth as much. That does not necessarily mean Diab was paid less than he was owed under the original terms up to that point; a termination and forfeiture of a future payable is a different thing from non-payment of amounts already earned, and no source states which amounts, if any, Diab had already received. It does mean that an exclusivity deal is a contract like any other, subject to renegotiation on terms set largely by the platform holding the content, and that the number in an early press release is not the number that survives to the contract’s actual end.

It also means the legal categories here are worth holding apart. Anghami never owned Diab’s masters; every document describing that relationship uses distribution and streaming language. Whether Sony now owns them, or simply holds the longest and most exclusive licence yet disclosed, is a real question none of the parties have chosen to answer publicly. For any artist evaluating a similar offer, that is the first question to get in writing, because a press release calling something an “acquisition” is not, on its own, proof that a sale occurred.