Abu Dhabi-based music rights management organization ESMAA has struck a music licensing deal with MENA-focused Spotify rival Anghami.
ESMAA represents the repertoire of MENA-based music publisher PopArabia, including the company’s Arabic music catalog and its global sub-published repertoire. ESMAA also represents the repertoire of IMPEL, the international collective of music publishers in its deal with Anghami. (IMPEL represents the digital music publishing rights of 57 independent music publishers across 14 territories.)
ESMAA claims that its partnership with Anghami is the “first of its kind” between international independent music publishers and a domestic streaming service in the MENA region.
The news arrives five months after Anghami completed its merger with MENA-based Netflix rival OSN+
ESMAA, claimed to be the first music rights management organization operating in the Gulf states, was launched in 2020 by MENA-based music publisher PopArabia, which signed a JV with Reservoir that same year.
PopArabia assumed the role of sub-publisher for all of Reservoir’s copyrights in the region, including collecting and distributing royalties and licensing music for sync.
As a result of ESMAA’s new deal with Anghami, a legal dispute between ESMAA (representing PopArabia and Reservoir) and the music streaming platform has now been resolved. As reported in early 2023, a lawsuit was filed in December 2022 against Anghami in Abu Dhabi for allegedly streaming unlicensed songs.
Speaking with MBW, ESMAA and PopArabia Founder and CEO Spek (Hussain Yoosuf), who also acts as Executive Vice President of International and Emerging Markets at Reservoir, said that Angahmi is “an important player” in the market.
He added: “We’re in the business of licensing music. We’re really just looking for opportunities to license music and having a domestic player like Anghami come to a resolution with us to ensure that independent music is licensed, I think, provides a strong signal to the rest of the industry.”
ESMAA’s deal with Anghami marks the latest milestone for the music rights management organization in its four years of operating in the market.
The org has deals in place to represent the rights of global collecting societies, including SOCAN (Canada) and the UK’s PRS For Music, and has also partnered with numerous publishers and CMOs to represent their catalogs. ESMAA also represents SESAC, STIM, SOCAN, and SoundExchange.
Speaking with MBW, Spek explained that the Anghami agreement “is a big deal” for ESMAA and for the Gulf.
“We’ve been able to put this deal together on behalf of not just PopArabia and Reservoir repertoire, but to include essentially all of the PopArabia sub-published repertoire, and the ESMAA represented rights group, which includes IMPEL,” he added.
“Effectively, the vast majority of the independent music [publishing] community, we expect to go through this deal. It’s the first time that an entity in the Gulf has been able to administer a deal of this kind, with the magnitude of the global industry flowing through a local entity.”
As detailed in MBW’s recent World Leaders interview with Spek, the exec, who started his career in the music industry in the early 1990s as a rapper in Canada, moved to the Middle East in 2006 and set up PopArabia in 2011.
He told us in that same interview that music rights management organization ESMAA, launched nine years later, “fills a void in the historical ecosystem” in the region.
Speaking with MBW today (September 12), Spek explained that “prior to ESMAA, there had really never been a rights management entity based in the Gulf, focusing on the Gulf region.”
He explained that, prior to launching ESMAA, he “started seeing rights management entities cropping up around the world filling a licensing gap in digital and in some cases, doing it better than the old players, the traditional players”.
Added Spek: “I started wondering, ‘What’s stopping us from doing something similar?’ We took a deep dive into the local law, we found that there was an ability for us to be licensed as a rights management entity.
“We were advised on how best to do so, to tick all the boxes and not fall afoul of the local regulatory framework. And so we did it.”
Commenting on his ambitions for ESMAA’s positioning in the future and state of music licensing in the region, Spek told us that he’d like I’d like the org to be seen “as the go-to operational partner for music rights management in the region”.
He added: “There’s been a sense over the years that licensing in the Middle East is really difficult, and it is, because it’s a fragmented market historically, and there’s never really been a holistic solution that is able to bring it all together. ESMAA changes that.”Music Business Worldwide
