MusicNation, the United Arab Emirates’ collective management organisation, announced on 13 September 2026 that it would manage the collection and distribution of neighbouring rights royalties for Mohamed Ramadan, the Egyptian singer, actor and producer known across the MENA region as “Number 1.” The announcement changes nothing about who owns his recordings. A rights-registry check shows those recordings have carried at least nine different label credits since 2018, and the new agreement sits on top of that sprawl without resolving a single piece of it.
Ramadan has spent two decades building one of the most recognisable entertainment careers in the Arab world, moving between music, television and film with a catalogue that has passed through Egyptian, Gulf and pan-Arab labels along the way. MusicNation’s announcement treats that entire catalogue as a single royalty stream to be collected, which is a simpler story than the one the catalogue itself tells. The full deal record, with every source checked line by line, is here.
What MusicNation’s mandate actually covers#
MusicNation calls itself, in its own words, “the UAE’s premier collective management organization,” responsible for licensing the rights of authors, publishers, sound recording owners and performers inside the country. Under the new agreement it will handle “the collective management and neighboring rights associated with Ramadan’s musical works, sound recordings and featured performances,” collecting and distributing the royalties generated when that material is used. Mohamed Ramadan is quoted calling it “an important step in ensuring my music is supported by a professional and internationally connected framework.” MusicNation’s Chairwoman and Founder, Rasha Khalifa Al Mubarak, is quoted welcoming him to “a modern rights management ecosystem designed for the global music industry.”
Read past the quotes and the agreement is narrow by design. It is a collection mandate, the legal shape a collective management organisation uses everywhere, applied here directly to one artist rather than through a reciprocal deal with another society. It says nothing about a label signing, a publishing deal, an advance, a royalty rate, a contract term or an exclusivity clause, because none of those are what a neighbouring rights mandate is. Afrobeats Wire has traced this same distinction before: Kobalt’s 2020 publishing deal with Mr Eazi’s emPawa administers a catalogue that emPawa’s own UK company owns outright. MusicNation’s mandate does not even rise to administration in that sense. It collects a defined royalty stream and pays it out. Nothing more is claimed, and nothing more should be assumed.
The catalogue underneath the announcement#
This is where the Ramadan deal becomes a useful case study rather than a routine one. A rights-registry query for his artist entry returns 53 catalogued releases. A sample of the first 25 alone carries label credits spread across at least nine separate names: Rotana and Rotana Music, Victory Link, Mazzika Group, Digital Sound, Beltone Records, Universal Arabic Music, Zain Records and Theramin Music, with several releases carrying no label credit at all. That is not unusual for a star of Ramadan’s longevity working across several Arab-market distribution eras, and it is not evidence of anything improper. It is simply the fact that MusicNation’s September 2026 announcement does not change.
Whatever company holds the rights to any individual Ramadan recording, before this agreement or after it, holds them exactly as it did the day before MusicNation’s announcement ran. A neighbouring rights collection mandate and a master recording are two different rights sitting in two different places, and conflating them is the single most common mistake a reader can make with a story like this one.
Only one of two claimed partnerships checks out#
MusicNation’s release states it has partnerships with both BMI and SoundExchange, both American organisations, which it says connect its members to “internationally connected rights management, licensing and royalty distribution services.” Checking both independently produced two different outcomes. SoundExchange’s own public list of international partners names “Music Nation” as its United Arab Emirates counterpart, which confirms that leg directly from the American side. BMI’s equivalent page, which would confirm the other half of the claim, was unreadable on every attempt: it returned a Cloudflare verification challenge rather than any page content. That does not make the BMI claim false. It means one half of MusicNation’s own pitch to artists is independently verifiable today, and the other half currently is not, which is a distinction worth knowing before citing the announcement as settled fact.
This is not the first time this desk has had to separate a collecting society’s stated international reach from what can actually be confirmed. SoundExchange’s own reciprocal agreement with Kenya’s KAMP was announced cleanly in February 2026 and unravelled domestically within five months, once Kenya’s own regulator suspended KAMP’s licence to operate. A reciprocal agreement between societies is only as solid as each society’s own standing, and that standing is rarely visible in the press release announcing the agreement.
What this means for artists#
A collecting society cannot sort out your masters for you. If your recordings have moved between labels and distributors over a long career, as Ramadan’s have, signing with a CMO changes who collects one specific royalty stream. It does not consolidate your back catalogue, does not confirm who owns what, and was never going to. That work, if it needs doing, is separate and has to be done separately.
Read an international partnership claim as two claims, not one. MusicNation’s release bundles BMI and SoundExchange into a single sentence. They are two separate relationships with two separate counterparties, and this record could only confirm one of them from the other side. An artist relying on either relationship to collect money owed abroad should ask the CMO directly which partnerships are active and request documentation, rather than taking a press release’s own bundling at face value.
“Not disclosed” covers more than money. No fee, commission, term or exclusivity clause appears in MusicNation’s announcement or anywhere else checked for this record. An artist considering a similar arrangement should expect those terms to be in the contract, not in the press release, and should ask for them before assuming the public framing is the whole deal.
What could not be established#
MusicNation’s partnership with BMI, independent of MusicNation’s own statement. BMI’s affiliated societies page returned a Cloudflare verification challenge on every attempt made for this record, and no alternative primary confirmation was found.
Any consideration, fee, commission rate, contract term or exclusivity clause attached to the Ramadan agreement. None appears in any source checked.
A complete picture of Ramadan’s recorded catalogue. The registry query used for this record returns results in pages of 25, and only the first page of his 53 listed releases was reviewed. The nine-label count in this piece is a floor on the sprawl, not a ceiling.
