Reservoir Media buys publishing rights to Lion King composer Lebo M’s catalogue

Reservoir Media, Inc. (NASDAQ: RSVR), the New York publisher already building a Middle East and North Africa catalogue through its PopArabia joint venture, has separately acquired the publishing rights to the catalogue of South African composer and arranger Lebohang Morake, known professionally as Lebo M. The deal covers his compositions and arrangement work across the Lion King franchise. It was signed in the run-up to a press announcement on 3 December 2024 and disclosed twice more in Reservoir’s own quarterly filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, first in February 2025 and again in the company’s full fiscal 2025 results that May. No purchase price has been disclosed in any of the three disclosures.

What was bought, precisely

Reservoir’s language is consistent and narrow across both SEC filings. The 8-K covering the quarter ended 31 December 2024 lists among its highlights that the company “signed publishing catalog deal with composer Lebohang Morake, professionally known as Lebo M.” The 8-K covering the full fiscal year, filed three months later, lists the same transaction among the year’s deals as rights “to the publishing catalog of Lebo M.” Both filings use the word publishing, not masters, not recordings, and not the underlying film soundtrack recordings themselves.

That distinction matters because a film score generates income on at least two separate tracks: a recording (the master, typically owned by the studio, in this case Walt Disney Studios) and a composition (the publishing, owned by whoever wrote it, split among songwriters and their publishers). Reservoir has bought into the second track only, for Morake’s share of it. Nothing in the filings, the press release, or the trade coverage that followed suggests Reservoir has any interest in the master recordings of Lion King soundtrack albums, the film itself, or Disney’s own music publishing arms, Walt Disney Music Company and Wonderland Music Company, which hold the top-line publishing on the franchise’s other compositions.

Whose credit, exactly

The catalogue’s centrepiece is “Circle of Life,” the song that opens the 1994 film and, in its Zulu-language “Nants’ingonyama bagithi Baba” chant, has become one of the most recognised pieces of vocal music to come out of a Hollywood soundtrack. It is worth being precise about who wrote what. The formal songwriting credit on “Circle of Life” belongs to Elton John and Hans Zimmer, with lyrics by Tim Rice. Morake did not write that song in the credited sense. His interest in the catalogue comes from his own contributions: the opening chant he wrote and performed in Zulu, his arrangement and vocal-production work across the film’s score, and his composing credits on the 1995 companion album Rhythm of the Pride Lands, the sequel The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, the 2019 photorealistic remake, the long-running Broadway musical (alongside Zimmer, John, Rice and Julie Taymor), and, most recently, 2024’s Mufasa: The Lion King, on which he worked with Lin-Manuel Miranda. Trade coverage of the Reservoir deal has occasionally blurred this by describing him loosely as the composer of “Circle of Life,” a shorthand that overstates his formal credit on that specific title while understating the size of his contribution across the rest of the franchise. Reservoir’s acquisition is of his own catalogue of that broader body of work, not of a co-writer stake in the John-Rice-Zimmer song.

What Reservoir paid, and what it has said about why

No source, filing, press release or trade report discloses a dollar figure. Reservoir’s Q3 fiscal 2025 results, filed the same quarter the deal was struck, disclosed that the company had “deployed over $70 million across catalog acquisitions” year to date, a figure covering multiple transactions including the Lastrada Entertainment publishing catalogue and an expanded deal with songwriter-producer Serban Cazan; the Lebo M deal is folded into that total without its own line. Reservoir chief executive Golnar Khosrowshahi said in the announcement that Morake’s music “has moved generations of film lovers,” calling the deal a reinforcement of “Reservoir’s interest in successful and culturally defining film scores.” Morake said the partnership would let him “continue pushing the boundaries of creativity” and reach new audiences. Neither statement addresses consideration, term, or whether the deal covers his future compositions as well as the existing catalogue, a structure Reservoir has used with other songwriters, including in the same quarter’s expanded Cazan deal, described explicitly as covering “future works.”

Where this sits in Reservoir’s Africa position

Reservoir’s African exposure has, until this deal, run almost entirely through PopArabia, the Abu Dhabi joint venture in which Reservoir holds a majority interest and through which it has acquired the Cairo label 100COPIES and the Dubai distributor Viral Wave, both MENA transactions this publication has previously reported on. Those are corporate acquisitions in North Africa and the Middle East, structured through a jointly controlled operating company. The Lebo M deal is different in kind: it is a direct catalogue acquisition from an individual South African songwriter, with no joint venture, no operating subsidiary, and no African corporate entity as counterparty. It is, on the documents available, Reservoir’s first disclosed catalogue purchase from a Sub-Saharan African rights holder, distinct from its North African label-buying through PopArabia.

A footnote worth recording: the chant, contested

In March 2026, Morake filed a federal lawsuit in the US District Court for the Central District of California against South African comedian Learnmore Mwanyenyeka, professionally known as Learnmore Jonasi, seeking $27 million over a viral video in which Jonasi offered a joke mistranslation of the “Nants’ingonyama” chant. Morake’s complaint describes the chant as “royal praise poetry” meaning “all hail the king, we all bow in the presence of the king,” and alleges the comedian’s version, rendered roughly as spotting a lion and reacting in surprise, damaged his business relationships with Disney and his royalty income. The suit does not name Reservoir and nothing in the reporting on it ties the litigation to the publishing deal. It is included here only because it is a second, independent, and separately sourced 2026 data point confirming that Morake actively treats this specific piece of the catalogue, the one at the centre of the Reservoir deal, as a commercially and reputationally live asset worth defending in a US federal court.

What this means for artists

The clearest lesson here is not about Reservoir. It is about how long it can take an African composer’s ownership position in a global cultural product to become fully legible, let alone monetised at a level a global publisher will pay real money to acquire. Morake wrote and performed on a film score in 1994 that has since become one of the highest-grossing entertainment franchises ever made, spanning a Broadway run that became the highest-grossing production in the medium’s history. It took thirty years for that interest to be consolidated, formally represented, and sold as a discrete publishing asset to a Nasdaq-listed company. For working composers and session vocalists on African productions today, film, television, advertising or otherwise, the practical takeaway is not to wait: contribution credit that is not captured precisely at the point of creation, split-sheeted and registered with a publisher or a collecting society, is a claim that has to be reconstructed later, at cost, and is worth less to a buyer for being harder to verify. The deal itself is a data point that global publishers are actively pricing African-originated composition rights in globally circulated works. Whether individual writers see comparable terms depends on whether their contribution was documented well enough, early enough, to be sold on its own.