Rema’s Masters Are Credited to Two Companies: Mavin Global Holdings and Jonzing World Entertainment. UMG Named Virgin Music Group as His International Distributor; His Catalogue Names Interscope.

What changed hands: On the documents, nothing has moved in the ownership of Rema’s recordings since 2019. The phonogram line on his catalogue names two companies, Mavin Global Holdings Ltd and Jonzing World Entertainment, and it still named both on his most recent single, released 7 August 2026. What has moved is who carries those recordings to market outside Africa, and the two best available documents disagree. Universal Music Group’s own February 2024 announcement said Mavin and its roster, naming Rema, were distributed internationally outside Africa through Virgin Music Group. Almost every Rema release since July 2024 names a different UMG company: Interscope Records.

Who owns the masters

This desk pulled Rema’s full catalogue from Apple’s own iTunes lookup on 29 August 2026. It returns 52 entries on which he is the lead artist, running from the self-titled EP of 22 March 2019 to the single “TEA” of 7 August 2026.

Fifty of those 52 name a Mavin entity as the owner of the sound recording copyright. The remaining two are live session recordings owned by COLORSxSTUDIOS, which is a different thing entirely and is credited as such. Of the 50 Mavin-credited entries, 39 also name Jonzing World, either as “Mavin Records / Jonzing World” on the earlier releases or as “Mavin Global Holdings Ltd / Jonzing World Entertainment” from 2021 onward. Eleven name a Mavin entity alone.

Two points of precision matter here. First, the ℗ symbol denotes ownership of the sound recording, not distribution and not a licence. A company named there is asserting that it owns the master. Second, the 11 Mavin-only entries are not evidence that Jonzing World was written out, because they are not sequential: they cluster in a batch of duplicate catalogue entries Apple carries alongside the originals, where the same title exists twice with two different credit strings. “Rave & Roses” appears once credited to “Mavin Global Holdings Ltd / Jonzing World Entertainment” and once, on a separate entry, to “Mavin Global Holdings Ltd” alone. Whether that is a re-delivery with a shortened credit or a real difference in who owns what could not be established.

Two labels, one artist, said out loud

The joint credit is not an accident of metadata. D’Prince, the founder of Jonzing World, described the arrangement in a Nigerian television interview reported on 25 January 2024. His words, as quoted in that report: “Rema is signed to Mavins, he is also signed to Jonzing World. Jonzing is my label. Mavin record is my label as well, that’s where I came from. You could call it a joint label/management operation going on there.”

That is a statement from a named party and it matches the credit line. It also says Jonzing World is both a label and a management company in the same relationship, a structure with obvious conflicts built into it and for which no party has published terms.

Jonzing World Entertainment Ltd is a real, separately named company. Its website resolves to a single page carrying the company name and the words “coming soon”, checked 29 August 2026. Nigeria’s corporate registry has no public API, so its shareholding could not be inspected. That matters: UMG’s February 2024 transaction took majority control of Mavin Global, and nothing in the announcement says whether Jonzing World Entertainment sat inside that perimeter or outside it. One of the two companies credited with owning these masters has an ownership structure that cannot be read from any public document.

Where the documents disagree

UMG’s announcement of 26 February 2024 contains this sentence, quoted in full because the punctuation is doing a lot of work: “Currently distributed internationally [ex-Africa] through Virgin Music Group with Rema, Mavin and its roster are already well integrated into UMG’s unrivalled network, with multiple signings across U.S. labels, including Republic partnering for Ayra Starr, and Interscope for Lifesize Teddy.”

Read it carefully and two things follow. UMG names Virgin Music Group, a UMG division, as the international distributor outside Africa, and it names Rema in that clause. And when it goes on to list the US label signings on the Mavin roster, it pairs Republic with Ayra Starr and Interscope with Lifesize Teddy. It names no US label for Rema at all.

The catalogue says something else. Rema’s album HEIS, released 10 July 2024, carries the line “℗ 2024 Mavin Global Holdings Ltd / Jonzing World Entertainment, distributed by Interscope Records and UMG Commercial Services.” So do “Baby (Is it a Crime)” on 7 February 2025, “Bout U” on 10 April 2025, “KELEBU” on 1 August 2025 and “TEA” on 7 August 2026. Six lead releases in total, from July 2024 to the present, name Interscope as distributor. Not one Rema catalogue entry, at any point, names Virgin Music Group.

Virgin Music Group and Interscope Records are both inside UMG, so this is not a story about a distributor being poached. It is two documents from the same corporate family describing the same artist’s distribution differently, five months apart, with nothing in between explaining the change. This desk found no statement from UMG, Mavin, Jonzing World, Virgin or Interscope reconciling them.

Two wrinkles are worth stating rather than smoothing over. Interscope’s name did appear on one much earlier Rema release: the 25 August 2022 “Calm Down” remix with Selena Gomez, credited “Mavin Global Holdings Ltd/Jonzing World Entertainment/SMG Music LLC, under exclusive licence to Interscope Records”. That is the only Rema credit line anywhere using the words “exclusive licence”, a different legal relationship from distribution, and it is a joint release with an Interscope artist whose own company sits on the same line. It does not establish an Interscope relationship for Rema’s own catalogue in 2022, and this record does not treat it as one. Separately, the single “FUN”, released 5 September 2025, breaks the run: it names Mavin and Jonzing World and no distributor at all, sitting between two releases that name Interscope.

Testing the 2024 exit rumours against the credit line

Through mid-2024 Nigerian media carried repeated reports that Rema had left, or was buying his way out of, his Mavin and Jonzing World contracts. No party ever confirmed a departure on the record, and this desk located no statement from Rema, Mavin, Jonzing World or UMG that one occurred.

Two current documents point the other way. Mavin’s own artists page, read on 29 August 2026, lists Rema among its current artists. The same page carries a separate “legacy artists” section, and D’Prince and Crayon are in it, so the page does distinguish current from former relationships rather than listing everyone who passed through. And the credit line on “TEA”, released 7 August 2026, still names both Mavin Global Holdings Ltd and Jonzing World Entertainment as owners of the recording. Whatever was negotiated in 2024, the ownership credit did not change.

What this means for artists

Three lessons sit inside this record, and none are about Rema personally.

A joint credit is a joint claim. When two companies appear either side of a slash on a ℗ line, assume both are asserting an ownership interest in that master, and know from your own contract what the split is and what happens to it if one of the two is sold. UMG bought majority control of Mavin Global. It did not, on any public document, buy Jonzing World. An artist in that position needs to know which of their two owners changed hands.

A corporate press release and a DSP credit line are not the same class of document, and where they conflict neither automatically wins. A press release is written by a communications team for an announcement moment. A credit line is submitted by whoever delivers the release and is audited by nobody. Rema’s paperwork produced two different distributors from those two sources within five months. If your contract does not name the distributing entity in terms, the only public record of who distributes you may be metadata nobody signed.

And this record covers master recordings only. Who administers Rema’s songwriting share could not be established, which is the norm rather than the exception for African artists at his level. An artist who can point to their master ownership but cannot name their publishing administrator has verified half of their business.

What is not established

No consideration, advance, royalty rate, revenue share or contract term has been disclosed by any party for Rema’s arrangement with Mavin or Jonzing World, or for the distribution relationship with Interscope. No territory is stated on any credit line; the only territorial statement in any document here is UMG’s “[ex-Africa]” applied to Virgin’s international distribution as of February 2024, which the catalogue does not corroborate.

The split of ownership between Mavin Global Holdings Ltd and Jonzing World Entertainment could not be established. Whether UMG’s majority investment in Mavin Global captured any interest in Jonzing World Entertainment Ltd could not be established; Nigeria’s corporate registry has no public API and manual lookup was not available for this record. Publishing and songwriter administration could not be established: the ASCAP and BMI repertory search endpoints both refused requests from this server, and no publishing announcement naming Rema was located. Song-level credit strings on a five-writer remix name several publishers and do not resolve which one administers his own share, so none is stated here.

One registry divergence is worth logging. MusicBrainz carries HEIS dated 11 July 2024 with a single label, “Mavin Global Holdings Ltd”, naming neither Jonzing World nor Interscope. MusicBrainz label data is contributor-entered and is not a rights register, so it is logged as a check that did not corroborate the fuller credit rather than as a contradiction of it.