Two of Reservoir Media‘s own shareholders want to buy the rest of it. On 3 March 2026, Richmond Hill Investment Co., LP and Wesbild, Inc. put a preliminary, non-binding proposal to the Nasdaq-listed music company to acquire every share they do not already own, at $10.50 per share in cash. Six months later, on the evidence of Reservoir’s own filings, nothing has been agreed.
What is proposed to change hands is equity control of a listed parent company. No catalogue is being sold. Reservoir is the corporate roof over the Abu Dhabi publisher PopArabia, the MENA distributor Viral Wave, the Cairo label 100COPIES and the publishing rights to the Lebo M catalogue. None of those is a party to either proposal, and no filing reviewed for this piece says the ownership, administration or distribution of any of them would change.
What the letter offers#
The proposal is set out in a letter filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission as an exhibit to a Schedule 13D amendment. It offers $10.50 per share in cash for all outstanding common stock not already held by the two investors.
On price, the letter says $10.50 is “approximately 39% over the closing price on February 25, 2026, the trading day immediately prior to the day that the Company’s receipt of an unsolicited acquisition offer was first publicly reported, and approximately 41% over the 90-day volume-weighted average trading price.” It puts the implied enterprise value to EBITDA multiple, on the midpoint of Reservoir’s own fiscal 2026 guidance, at “approximately 15.6x”.
Three terms in the letter matter more than the number. The transaction “would not be subject to any financing contingency or condition”, meaning there is no lender who can walk. The investors say they “will not move forward with the Proposal unless it is approved by” a special committee of independent and disinterested directors. And they state they “are interested only in acquiring the outstanding common stock”, adding that neither is “interested in selling shares in the Company to a third party”.
That last sentence is the structural one. The letter states that “Wesbild, together with its affiliates, beneficially owns approximately 44% of the outstanding shares of common stock of the Company.” A 44 per cent holder who says in writing that it will not sell has effectively closed the door on anybody else buying Reservoir outright.
Who is bidding, and what they already are#
The letter carries two signatures: Ryan P. Taylor, managing partner of Richmond Hill, and Hassan Khosrowshahi, chairman of Wesbild. Reservoir’s proxy statement, filed on 26 June 2026, describes both men in relation to the company they are bidding for.
Hassan Khosrowshahi is named in the proxy as the father of Golnar Khosrowshahi, Reservoir’s founder and chief executive. Ryan P. Taylor is not merely a bidder: he is a sitting Reservoir director and a member of its nominating and corporate governance committee, and has been managing partner of Richmond Hill since 2010.
The same proxy sets out the register. Wesbild, Inc. and affiliates hold 28,776,573 shares, or 44 per cent. ER Reservoir LLC, of which Richmond Hill Investments, LLC is a manager, holds 13,665,475 shares, or 21 per cent. That is roughly two thirds of the company in and around the bidding group before a single new share is bought. This is the reason a special committee exists at all. In a transaction where the buyer sits on both sides of the table, the only meaningful negotiation happens between the buyer and directors who are independent of it.
Irenic bid first#
Irenic Capital Management LP, a New York activist investor, is not a supporter of the Wesbild proposal and not an opponent of it. It is a competing bidder, and it moved first.
Irenic’s own Schedule 13D amendment, filed on 2 March 2026, discloses that it submitted a non-binding proposal to acquire 100 per cent of Reservoir’s outstanding equity at between $10.00 and $11.00 per share in cash. Reservoir’s annual report confirms it received that indication of interest on 12 February 2026, three weeks before the Wesbild letter. Irenic’s filing shows a holding of 6,106,176 shares, about 9.3 per cent, acquired at an aggregate cost of roughly $40.8m.
Irenic’s proposal carries a condition the Wesbild letter does not: it is expressly conditioned on reaching agreement with the existing management team regarding their continued employment. Separately, and this piece draws no causal link between the two, Reservoir entered into amended and restated employment agreements with its chief executive, its president and chief operating officer and its chief financial officer on 5 March 2026, effective 1 April 2026, as disclosed in a current report filed the following day.
No aggregate price has been disclosed#
Not one of the filings reviewed states a total equity or enterprise value for either proposal. The per-share figure is the only number either bidder has committed to a document, and this publication records no other. Reservoir’s investor presentation of 18 August 2026 gives a market capitalisation of $651m on roughly 66m shares, with the stock at $9.89 as at 30 June 2026, but a market capitalisation is not a deal value and is not used as one here.
That share price is worth noting for a different reason. Nearly four months after a $10.50 cash proposal with no financing contingency, the stock closed the quarter below the offer. Markets price the probability of completion, not the headline.
Where it stands#
Reservoir’s board formed a special committee of independent and disinterested directors to evaluate what the company calls, in the plural, “the Proposals”. On 1 May 2026 it announced that the committee had engaged Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC as financial adviser and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz as legal counsel. Those are not exploratory appointments.
Since then, the record has not moved. Reservoir’s quarterly report for the period ended 30 June 2026, filed on 4 August 2026, repeats the annual report’s language without change: “There can be no assurance that any definitive agreement will result from either of the Proposals or that any transaction will be consummated with Irenic, Richmond Hill, Wesbild or any other party.”
No current report disclosing entry into a material definitive agreement appears in Reservoir’s filing index through 4 September 2026. The company held its annual meeting on 6 August 2026 and elected all three of its Class II nominees. Its most recent filing, the August investor presentation, does not mention the proposals at all. The outcome is unresolved, and this publication will not guess at it.
Two filings, two dates#
The documents disagree on one point and it is recorded rather than smoothed over. Reservoir’s annual report says the special committee was announced “On March 4, 2026”. Its proxy statement, filed on 26 June 2026, says “on March 5, 2026, we announced that the Board formed a special committee”. Two filings by the same company give different dates for the same announcement. Neither is treated here as settled. The deal record uses 3 March 2026, the date on the proposal letter itself.
What this means for artists#
For a songwriter signed through PopArabia in Abu Dhabi or through 100COPIES in Cairo, the honest answer is: on the documents available, nothing changes.
A change in who owns the shares of a listed parent is not a transfer of the copyrights its subsidiaries own or administer. Publishing agreements, administration agreements and distribution agreements sit with the operating companies, and they survive a change in the shareholder register. Nothing in either proposal purports to assign, license or move any catalogue. If a writer’s deal is with a Reservoir subsidiary today, it is with the same subsidiary the day after any take-private closes, on the same terms, unless that subsidiary separately agrees otherwise.
What does change, if the company goes private, is visibility. Every fact in this piece came out of a mandatory public filing. A private company files none of them. The disclosure that tells an Egyptian or South African rightsholder who ultimately controls their publisher, what that publisher paid for its last acquisition and how much debt sits above the catalogue would simply stop. Reservoir’s own annual report values the MENA opportunity explicitly, describing the region as one of the fastest growing recorded music markets in 2025, and PopArabia bought the distributor Viral Wave for approximately $5.7m in a transaction that closed on 7 April 2026. Under private ownership, the next deal of that kind would be announced only if somebody chose to announce it.
The second thing to watch is capital allocation. Take-privates are frequently financed with debt at the parent level, and a parent servicing new borrowings makes different decisions about advances and acquisitions than one answering to public equity holders. That is a general pattern, not a claim about this transaction: neither bidder has disclosed a financing structure, and the Wesbild letter says the proposal carries no financing contingency at all.
What could not be established#
The membership of Reservoir’s special committee is not named in any filing reviewed. No aggregate transaction value exists in any document. Whether the special committee has rejected, countered or is still evaluating either proposal is not disclosed. And Reservoir’s annual report for the year ended 31 March 2026 does not name 100COPIES or the Lebo M catalogue anywhere: this publication’s record of those holdings rests on its own earlier reporting and on Reservoir’s subsidiary schedules, not on the filings cited above.
The transaction record for this proposal, with every primary document cited, is filed as Wesbild and Richmond Hill bid $10.50 a share to take Reservoir Media private in the Afrobeats Wire deal database. Company profiles: Wesbild, Inc., Richmond Hill Investment Co., LP, Irenic Capital Management LP, Reservoir Media.
