Music trade sites and an artist social post reported this week that “The Game Needs Us,” the 2026 EP BNXN made with Sarz, has crossed 100 million streams on Spotify, a trajectory this desk can corroborate only loosely against a third-party streaming tracker that logged roughly 89.8 million streams in mid-October. No official Spotify disclosure of the figure was found. What 100 million Spotify streams is worth in money, and to whom, is a separate question, and the EP’s own credit line answers part of it before any contract does. The copyright notice on the release does not name two artists. It names three companies: 1789, EMPIRE and T.Y.E. Whatever Spotify owes for streams of this EP is owed, in the first instance, to whichever of those three the distribution agreements actually pay, not to Daniel Benson or Osaretin Osabuohien as people. This desk has already investigated two of those three names on separate records, and neither investigation found a disclosed fee, royalty rate or revenue split. The milestone is public. The money behind it is not.
What the credit line says, verified again today#
MusicBrainz’s release record for “The Game Needs Us,” an EP first released 11 May 2026, lists three labels against it: 1789, EMPIRE and T.Y.E., matching the barcode this desk checked independently against Apple Music and Deezer for an earlier record on BNXN’s catalogue. That earlier record traced the T.Y.E./EMPIRE pairing back to October 2021 and found it has not broken once since, across at least ten releases and five years, including this EP. Nothing about reaching 100 million streams changes what that credit line discloses. It still names companies, not people, and it still does not say what any of them is owed.
Sarz’s half: a company you can check, a fee you can’t#
1789 is the artist-development imprint run by the producer Sarz. UK Companies House lists 1789 Entertainment Ltd, company number 13200014, incorporated 15 February 2021 and still active as of this week. Its persons-with-significant-control register names exactly one person, Sarz, born Osaretin Osabuohien, holding 75 per cent or more of the shares, notified the day the company was formed. No distributor, label or fund appears on that register.
In June 2023, UnitedMasters agreed to distribute music from 1789. Every release this desk has checked since, including 1789-credited work after that date, carries a phonogram notice reading “1789 under exclusive license to UnitedMasters LLC,” language that describes a distribution licence, not a sale of masters or an equity stake. UnitedMasters’ own self-serve pricing page states plainly that artists on its consumer SELECT plan, priced at $59.99 a year, “keep 100% of your streaming earnings.” That is a real, sourced number, and it is also not evidence about this specific deal. The 1789 agreement is a negotiated partnership covering five African markets, not a self-serve sign-up, and nothing published by either side states whether 1789 pays a distribution fee, a revenue share, or neither. UnitedMasters’ public 100 per cent figure describes its retail product. What it charges 1789 has never been disclosed by either party.
BNXN’s half: a credit that has held for five years, a question nobody has answered#
T.Y.E., short for To Your Ears Entertainment, is the label name that has carried BNXN’s masters since he left Burna Boy’s Spaceship Entertainment in 2021. EMPIRE’s name joined T.Y.E.’s on the credit line starting with the single “Sorry I’m Late” in October 2021 and has not left since. MusicBrainz assigns EMPIRE the role Distributor on that catalogue. But no statement from either company, from BNXN, or from a named executive on either side has ever described what the arrangement actually is: a distribution deal, a joint venture on the model EMPIRE and Olamide’s YBNL Nation have described publicly, or a services arrangement that falls short of either. A search of SEC EDGAR’s filings for EMPIRE, T.Y.E. and BNXN returned nothing, which is expected for a privately held distributor and proves nothing about these specific terms either way. Five years and ten-plus releases into the pairing, including this EP, no document establishes a fee, an advance or a royalty split for EMPIRE’s side of the credit.
100 million Spotify streams in money is not one number#
Here is the part that gets lost in a milestone headline. Spotify does not pay a fixed rate per stream. It pools subscription and advertising revenue separately by market and pays out pro rata against total listening in that pool, a mechanism this desk has traced in detail from Spotify’s own segment filings. What that means for a figure like “100 million Spotify streams” is that the gross amount it represents depends on where those streams happened, what mix of paying subscribers and free listeners generated them, and which quarter they fell in, none of which is published per track. Multiplying 100 million by any single public per-stream estimate produces a number that looks precise and is not, because the real pool a given stream falls into can pay several times more or less than another stream counted in the same headline figure.
What can be said with more confidence is where that money goes first. It goes to whichever company is named on the phonogram credit and holds the DSP distribution relationship, in this case split three ways on paper between 1789, EMPIRE and T.Y.E. Only after each of those companies has taken whatever cut its own contract specifies does anything move to Sarz or to BNXN personally, and the size of that cut, on both sides of this EP, is not public. A reader who assumes a streaming milestone converts cleanly into an artist’s bank balance is skipping over at least two contractual layers that this desk could document existing and could not document the terms of.
The other half of the stream: publishing nobody could find#
Every stream generates two separate payments under different rights: one for the recording, which is the master-rights chain above, and one for the underlying composition, owed to whoever wrote and publishes the song. This desk attempted to check who administers the publishing side of “The Game Needs Us” through the public search tools available to it. ASCAP’s ACE repertory search returned a 403 error blocking automated access, and BMI’s repertoire search returned a bot-detection challenge page rather than search results. Neither search could be completed, and no publisher, administrator or PRO affiliation for this specific composition could be established through any source this desk could reach. That is a gap in what can be reported, not a finding that no such registration exists.
What this means for artists#
A streaming milestone is an attention number before it is a money number, and the gap between the two is where most of the real contract sits. For an artist watching a collaborator’s or a rival’s song cross 100 million streams, the useful questions are not “how much did that pay,” because no public figure answers it precisely for any specific track, but “who is named on the credit line, and what does each name on it actually do.” Owning, administering, distributing and licensing are four different relationships, and a shared credit line does not say which of them applies to any company on it. On “The Game Needs Us,” this desk could verify that 1789 is Sarz’s own company and that UnitedMasters holds a distribution licence to it, not a stake. It could not verify what either side of BNXN’s EMPIRE credit is owed, and it could not locate who administers the song’s publishing at all. Three companies are named. Two of their relationships to the recording are documented. None of their splits of the money 100 million streams actually generates are public, and a reader should not assume otherwise just because the stream count is.
Limits of this record: the three-way phonogram credit on “The Game Needs Us” is independently confirmed via MusicBrainz’s release data, cross-checked against this desk’s prior, separately sourced findings on BNXN’s catalogue (published 16 September 2026) and on 1789’s UK company filing and UnitedMasters agreement (published 20 September 2026). Not established: any fee, advance, royalty rate or equity position between 1789 and UnitedMasters specific to this deal; any fee, advance, royalty rate or deal classification between T.Y.E. and EMPIRE; the actual gross or net revenue generated by the EP’s streams in any market; and any publisher, administrator or collecting-society registration for the composition. UnitedMasters, EMPIRE, T.Y.E. and 1789 were not reached directly for comment before publication.
