Investors are circling the region’s undermonetized IP

In the UAE, there’s another option coming onto the scene for investors: your favorite song or film. Two funds setting up shop in the UAE this year are looking at entertainment intellectual property (IP) — film scripts, music catalogs, artist likenesses — as an investable asset, the way real estate already has. One wants to buy the Arabic catalog that already exists and make it work harder. The other wants to manufacture new IP from nothing and use the UAE as its production base.

REFRESHER- CineNow set up its HQ in the UAE last month as part of its push to turn IP from India’s cinema industry into a tokenized asset, targeting a USD 150 mn fund, with 60% of that already raised in a first round. Meanwhile, UAE-based IPNation is launching an investment platform focusing on Arabic music and entertainment IP — taking iconic, already-existing Arabic music catalogs and making them work harder through better collection, distribution, and reactivation — in the MENA region, with a USD 100 mn target investment size.

The undervalued catalog

IPNation’s thesis is that Arabic IP is undermonetized. “MENA remains under-institutionalized compared with the US, Europe, and parts of Asia,” IPNation’s co-founder and CEO José María Dot says. “There are major global funds focused on music rights elsewhere, but the region still lacks a scaled platform dedicated to acquiring and managing iconic local catalogs.” Consumption, he argues, was never the hard part: Arabic music “has always traveled” — what’s been missing is the infrastructure to collect around it and reinvest.

Reactivation is the growth lever once a catalog is secured — remixes, sync placements, brand campaigns, live experiences. Dot’s favorite proof point is ABBA Voyage, the hologram-residency show that contributed a reported USD 2.1 bn to the UK economy through the end of last year — evidence that a mature catalog’s ceiling isn’t fixed. On the investor side, IPNation is pitching a hybrid case rather than a pure yield play: “infrastructure-like recurring cashflows” from mature catalogs, paired with “private equity-style upside” from active management.

Building the ecosystem, not just the fund

CineNow is more of a manufacturer. It uses investor capital to create IP that doesn’t exist yet, then tokenizes the fund that owns it. Unproven IP doesn’t scare CineNow Director Rohit Dalmia the way it might a traditional financier. The risk of backing something unreleased, he says, is already priced into what CineNow pays, leaving early entry, broader rights, and franchise upside as the reward.

Where CineNow's UAE pitch gets more interesting is what it asks producers to do in return for financing — not simply take the money and go make a film in India. “We’re also requiring all the producers who work with us to set up shop here with economic substance,” Dalmia says, “because we’re not giving them financing in India — we’re giving them financing locally here.” He frames it as wealth creation distinct from ordinary capital attraction: “That’s not capital, that’s not expenses or cashflows — that’s wealth.”

The pitch appears to be landing with local authorities. Dalmia says CineNow has been in advanced talks with the Dubai Media Council and the Abu Dhabi Investment Office to secure a formal government-backed partnership, hopefully by the end of this month.

But how do you tokenize a creative asset?

The key question CineNow is asking: “How do you discover the price of an IP?” Tokenization is meant to solve that through supply and demand. Dalmia says: “Every time a film does well, the token values are going to go up. Every time a film does badly, it could either come down or just hold. That’s showing demand for that IP.” David Bintliff, a Greenberg Traurig shareholder specializing in media, entertainment, and technology law, frames the same problem from the regulatory side: “Valuation should match the interest being offered,” shaped by factors including “audience demand, distribution [agreements], and rights expiry,” in addition to “disputes, infringement, and discount rates.”

The first step ahead of tokenization is “establishing exactly what is owned by whom, for how long, and in which territories,” Dalmia says. Then, it moves on to developing an investment structure to organize these rights and establish how revenues are collected, how costs are recovered, and how proceeds are distributed. “The token itself does not magically create value. Its value ultimately comes from the underlying contractual rights and the revenues generated by the IP,” he tells us.

Buying a token, Bintliff says, “does not, of itself, transfer the copyright or [statutory] title in the underlying creative work” — what a holder actually gets depends entirely on what’s written into the token’s terms, which “can range from personal display only to broad rights to commercialize and create derivative works.” His go-to example: buyers of NBA Top Shot collectibles get limited rights to the associated footage, not ownership of the footage itself.

What gets tokenized is the fund, not the IP itself. Investors are “seeding us with capital to create IP” — “locking in the script, the cast, the crew, and a bit of pre-production” — with an exit that comes later, when “the token holders come in like an IPO.” The model is built for sustainability too: “It's not about one fund in six years. Capital keeps coming, returns keep happening, and investors redeploy into seeding the next set of IPs,” Dalmia says. “It becomes a cyclical model.”

Where the law stands

Bintliff's read on the region: real progress, not full maturity. “Singapore, Switzerland, the UK, and the UAE stand out” globally on tokenization regulation, he says, and “the UAE in particular has taken significant steps on the regulation and infrastructure to support tokenization.” But regulatory progress and certainty aren’t the same thing — whether a given token is treated as a security, a fund unit, or something else “requires a case-specific analysis.”

On IPNation’s side of the ledger, the relevant infrastructure isn’t tokenization law but collection: Dot points to the UAE’s newly licensed Collective Management Organizations (CMOs) — Emirates Music Rights Association (EMRA), and Music Nation — as “important steps toward a more investable rights economy.”

Both are recent: EMRA became the UAE’s first-ever licensed CMO in April 2025, a nonprofit authorized to collect and distribute royalties on the public performance, broadcast, and streaming use of music on behalf of composers, performers, and producers. Music Nation followed two months later as a second, commercially run option, with partnerships already in place with global rights bodies BMI and SoundExchange. Bintliff’s caveat there applies regardless of structure — CMOs are “well established” but still catching up to any form of pooled, investor-facing rights income: “the challenge is connecting reliable royalty reporting and payment systems to enforceable investor entitlements.”

When it comes to disputes, “novel structures can raise unresolved questions about the relationship between the token and the underlying rights,” Bintliff tells us. However, “clear underlying documents, verified title, and a workable enforcement route materially improve the position,” he says.

What’s next

The age of streaming: “Streaming has changed the investment profile of music and entertainment assets by making demand more visible,” Dot tells us. Rights owners and investors now have more visibility into audience engagement and demand, helping to flag untapped potential, he says. For film, it has increased both audience access routes and options for monetization, Dalmia says.

AI cuts the other way: With so-called AI creators already boasting of full films made with zero human input, Dot argues scarcity holds the real value. “In an environment where anyone can generate sound, timeless music becomes more scarce [...] the value sits in catalogs with history, loyal audiences, and cultural weight,” he says.

The bottom line: “With the correct rights infrastructure, capital, and active management, the region can turn [its cultural] influence into lasting economic value,” Dot says.