Reservoir Media and PopArabia Bought Part of Cairo’s RE Media Catalogue in 2023. Neither Side Has Ever Said How Much of It, or for What Price

On 23 August 2023, Reservoir Media and its Abu Dhabi subsidiary PopArabia announced two acquisitions in Cairo on the same day. The first bought “some” of the catalogue belonging to RE Media, an Egyptian content company run by Richard Elhaj since 2004, a library its own founder puts at more than 6,000 recordings and compositions. Neither company has ever said how much of that library changed hands, or what it paid.

What the companies actually said

Reservoir and PopArabia’s own newsroom release names three things as part of the RE Media deal: a share of the recordings-and-compositions catalogue, the sub-labels Moseeqa and Moseeqa TV, and several of RE Media’s YouTube channels, which together carry roughly one million subscribers and are being folded into PopArabia’s own YouTube hub. The release singles out one title by name, Amr Diab’s 1986 debut album “Ya Tareeq,” as part of what moved. Richard Elhaj is quoted saying he is “very proud to have struck an arrangement with PopArabia for the acquisition of some of our catalog.” Hussain “Spek” Yoosuf, PopArabia’s founder and CEO and Reservoir’s executive vice president of international and emerging markets, frames the deal as a bet on Egyptian repertoire inside Arabic popular music generally.

That is a catalogue acquisition, stated in those words by the buyer. It is not, on the documents available, a purchase of RE Media’s company. Nothing in the release, or in any report corroborating it, states that Reservoir or PopArabia took an equity stake in RE Media, bought its distribution business, or acquired its full library rather than a share of it. RE Media’s own site is still live under Richard Elhaj’s name, still presenting Moseeqa, Pyramedia and the group’s other label brands as an operating business. That is consistent with a catalogue-only sale, though it is not, on its own, proof of exactly where the line was drawn.

The gap the announcement leaves open

“Some of our catalog” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is Elhaj’s own phrase, not a reporter’s paraphrase. A library described as “over 6,000 recordings and compositions” could mean the acquisition covered a tenth of it or nearly all of it, and no document checked for this record narrows that further. The price is the same story: not one source, including Reservoir’s own quarterly filing for the period, itemises a figure for the RE Media deal specifically. Reservoir’s results for the quarter in which the deal closed list RE Media among that period’s catalogue additions without a number attached, the same treatment the company gives most of its smaller acquisitions.

That is not unusual for a mid-sized catalogue deal, and Afrobeats Wire is not implying anything was hidden. It is the ordinary texture of how these transactions get disclosed: enough detail to make a press day work, not enough to let an outsider price the asset. The honest record of this deal is therefore a record of what was announced, not of what was paid or precisely how much of RE Media’s shelf of recordings it covers.

The deal announced alongside it

Reservoir and PopArabia used the same release to announce a second transaction: the acquisition of master and publishing rights to the catalogue of El Sawareekh, the Egyptian rap duo of Ahmed “Dokdok” Abdelhamed and Bassem “Fanky” Mohamed. That deal is not recorded here as a separate entry in this publication’s deal database, because its seller is the two performers rather than a company this desk can verify as a distinct legal entity, but it belongs in the same story. The duo’s biggest track, “Laa,” had already passed through Reservoir and PopArabia’s hands once before, via their 2022 purchase of the Cairo label 100COPIES, which had released it. The 2023 deal appears to extend the buyers’ position in El Sawareekh’s catalogue beyond that single song to the fuller body of masters and publishing. No price was disclosed for this transaction either.

Part of a pattern, not a one-off

The RE Media and El Sawareekh deals sit inside a run of Egyptian acquisitions that PopArabia and Reservoir have built since 2020, when Reservoir first took a controlling stake in the Abu Dhabi publisher. PopArabia and Reservoir bought the Cairo label 100COPIES, founded by producer Mahmoud Refaat, in 2022. They added RE Media and El Sawareekh in August 2023. In 2024 PopArabia bought the Cairo-based label and distributor Viral Wave for a disclosed $5.9 million, the one deal in this run where Reservoir’s own filings put a number on the transaction. Reservoir’s subsidiary schedules also show its disclosed stake in PopArabia itself rising from 51.00 per cent to 56.23 per cent between its filings for the years ended 31 March 2025 and 31 March 2026, alongside a cash payment of $287,650 to buy out minority shareholders somewhere in its structure, though the filing does not name PopArabia as the subject of that specific payment.

Read together, those facts describe a company steadily consolidating its hold on Egyptian recorded music and publishing, deal by deal, mostly without disclosed prices, and occasionally correcting or restating even the ownership percentages it does disclose. RE Media’s catalogue is one piece of that consolidation. It sits in PopArabia’s hands now in whatever share Elhaj and PopArabia agreed to in August 2023, inside a MENA publishing and recorded-music business that Reservoir’s own accounts show it controls more tightly with each passing fiscal year.

What this means for artists

If your recordings or compositions sit inside a label group like RE Media’s, built from multiple sub-labels and channel brands accumulated over two decades, a catalogue sale by the group’s owner does not automatically tell you which of your own works moved, to whom, or on what terms. Richard Elhaj’s own description of the RE Media deal, “some of our catalog,” is a reminder that a group-level acquisition announcement is not a title search. An artist or a writer whose masters or compositions were recorded or published through one of RE Media’s labels, Moseeqa included, has standing to ask Reservoir, PopArabia or RE Media directly whether their specific recordings were part of what sold, because the public announcement will not answer that question for them.

The wider lesson sits in what Reservoir’s own numbers show about PopArabia itself. A publisher or distributor an artist signs to today can be majority-owned by a different, larger company tomorrow, through transactions that may never generate their own press release. Reservoir’s stake in PopArabia moved by more than five percentage points in a single fiscal year without a dedicated announcement marking it; it showed up only in a subsidiary schedule filed with a US regulator. Anyone assessing who ultimately controls a Middle East or North Africa label deal, including an African one administered or distributed through PopArabia’s network, should check the buyer’s own regulatory filings rather than relying on the partnership language trade coverage tends to use, because the filed ownership figure and the public framing of the relationship do not always say the same thing.