Nothing was sold. That is the first thing to understand about the corporate structure sitting underneath one of the most successful catalogues South African music has produced. Black Coffee’s master recordings have been owned throughout by his own company, Soulistic Music. What moved was the right to exploit them, and it moved twice at once, to two different major-label entities, carved up by territory.
Apple’s own catalogue metadata proves the split in the plainest way available: it runs two separate product listings for the same album, and names a different licensee on each.
The document that settles it#
The album Pieces of Me exists twice in Apple’s catalogue. On the South African storefront it is collection 1442987534, dated 4 September 2015, and the phonographic credit reads “℗ 2015 Soulistic Music, under exclusive license to Universal Music (Pty) Ltd (ZA)”. On the United States storefront it is collection 1730800792, dated 26 August 2016, and the credit reads “℗ 2016 Soulistic Music under exclusive license to Ultra Records, LLC”.
Same album. Same artist. Two Apple product IDs, two named exclusive licensees, and in both cases the identical named owner: Soulistic Music.
That pairing does a lot of work. The ℗ line is the phonogram credit, the public statement of who owns a sound recording, and it is often the only document about a release that anyone outside the deal ever sees. Here it establishes that Soulistic Music is the owner, that Universal Music (Pty) Ltd (ZA) is a licensee rather than an owner, and that Ultra Records, LLC is a separate licensee rather than an owner. None of these is a distribution credit. None of them describes a sale. An exclusive licence is a permission to exploit a recording, usually for a defined term and territory, after which the recording reverts to whoever owned it the whole time.
The wording degrades in one territory and not the other#
On the South African storefront the formula holds for roughly two decades. Apple’s catalogue for the artist carries “Soulistic Music, under exclusive license to Universal Music South Africa”, or the near-identical rendering naming Universal Music (Pty) Ltd (ZA), on a self-titled album credited ℗ 2002, then on Have Another One in 2007, Home Brewed in 2009, We Are One in 2011, Pieces of Me in 2015, Drive in 2018, LaLaLa in 2019, SBCNCSLY and Ready For You in 2020, and on the album Subconsciously, credited ℗ 2020 and released on 5 February 2021. Soulistic Music is named as owner on every single one.
The United States listings for the same recordings tell a different story, and the wording quietly erodes. The 2016 releases still name both sides. Pieces Of Me and the single Your Eyes both read “Soulistic Music under exclusive license to Ultra Records, LLC”. Then, from Drive on 24 August 2018, the owner drops out of the line altogether. Drive, its remix package, Wish You Were Here, LaLaLa, SBCNCSLY, Ready For You and Subconsciously itself all carry a bare “℗ Ultra Records, LLC”, with Soulistic Music nowhere in the credit.
This is worth stating precisely, because it is exactly the kind of detail that gets misread as a sale. It is a change in credit wording, not evidence of a change in ownership. The South African listing for the identical recordings kept naming Soulistic Music as owner across the very same years, including on Subconsciously. Nothing found in any registry, filing or announcement says the masters were transferred to Ultra Records or to any Universal entity at any point.
Checking it against other registries#
Two further sources were checked directly and both corroborate the international leg. Deezer’s album data returns the label as “Ultra Records, LLC” for Subconsciously with the UPC 617465024153, and returns the same label for Drive, Pieces Of Me, LaLaLa, SBCNCSLY and Ready For You. MusicBrainz, an open rights registry, independently records the barcode 617465024153 against Subconsciously and names the label as Ultra Records, and records barcode 617465980053 against Drive. Every international release shares the 617465 prefix, which is consistent with one issuing label across the run.
Neither service names Universal on these releases. That is not a contradiction of the South African credit so much as a consequence of what each service indexes, which is the international product. The territory split is the reading that satisfies all three registries at once. It should be said plainly, though, that this is an interpretation. The alternative, that the South African credit is simply stale metadata Apple never refreshed, cannot be ruled out from registry data alone, and no contract has been published that would settle it.
Who Ultra Records is now#
The Ultra relationship was announced on 25 April 2016. Reporting that day quoted David Waxman, then the label’s General Manager and Vice President of A&R, and described the arrangement in terms that match the credit line almost word for word: Ultra would put out a new version of Pieces of Me, an album originally released by Soulistic Music and available only in South Africa, and the new edition would go out globally with additional tracks.
The ownership of the counterparty then changed underneath the deal. Ultra Records, LLC has been wholly owned by Sony Music Entertainment since a transaction reported on 20 January 2022, when Sony took the remainder of the label and founder Patrick Moxey exited. Sony’s first stake dated from a strategic relationship announced in January 2013. No price was disclosed for either tranche.
The timing is neat enough to be worth spelling out. Subconsciously won Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 64th Grammy Awards on 3 April 2022, the first time a South African producer had won or even been nominated in that category. The album was licensed to a company Sony part-owned when it came out, and wholly owned by the time the trophy was handed over. The masters themselves, on the evidence of the South African credit line, never left Soulistic Music.
One clarification matters here, because the names invite confusion. Ultra Records, LLC is not the same company as Ultra International Music Publishing, the publishing business founded by the same person, which Moxey kept when he sold the label and which was renamed Payday Music Publishing in April 2025 after it lost a trademark case to Sony. Different entities, different owners. Nothing in this story concerns Black Coffee’s publishing, which could not be established.
Both names leave the catalogue#
After Subconsciously, neither licensee appears on any Black Coffee lead credit checked. There’s Music in the Air, from September 2022, reads “℗ 2022 Gallo Record Company”. The Rapture Pt. III, from June 2023, reads “℗ 2023 Keinemusik”. Trippy Yeah, from June 2025, reads “℗ 2025 Innervisions”. The Deep In The Bottom (Of Africa) remix packages from November 2025 and August 2026 read “℗ BIGGASOUNDS under exclusive licence to KLTR”.
No party has announced the end of either licence. Whether they ran their term and expired, were terminated, or were simply not renewed is not established by anything found.
What this means for artists#
The useful lesson is that owning your masters and controlling them everywhere are two different things, and that the gap between them is where most of the money sits. Black Coffee kept ownership. He still licensed exploitation to a major in his home market and to a second major-owned label for the rest of the world, and for five years those two arrangements ran side by side on identical recordings. An artist can hold the copyright and still have very little say over how a recording is marketed in a territory they have licensed away.
The second lesson is about credit lines specifically. If you are an artist, your ℗ line is the closest thing to a public record of your rights, and it can be written in a way that quietly stops naming you. On this catalogue the international credit named the owner in 2016 and stopped naming the owner in 2018, while the domestic credit named the owner throughout. Nobody announced that change. Anyone reading only the international listing from 2018 onward would reasonably conclude that a major label owned these recordings outright, and would be wrong.
The practical takeaway for anyone negotiating: ask for the credit wording to be specified in the agreement, not left to whoever uploads the delivery. Ask what happens to the ℗ line in each territory, ask whether the licence is exclusive and for how long, and ask what the credit reverts to when it ends. Those are cheap things to negotiate at signing and effectively impossible to fix afterwards.
And a caution for anyone reading catalogues the way this desk does: a credit line is evidence, not a contract. It can say two different things about the same album on two different storefronts, as it does here, and neither version is the deal.
What could not be established#
No consideration is stated anywhere. No advance, royalty rate, term, option or minimum commitment for either licence appears in any source checked, and none is asserted here. The start date of the Universal arrangement could not be fixed: the earliest credit naming it carries a ℗ 2002 year, while MusicBrainz gives Soulistic Music a start date of 2005, and that conflict is unresolved. Neither contract has been published.
South Africa’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission has no public search facility available to this desk, so no registry check of Soulistic Music as a legal entity was possible. Companies House in the United Kingdom holds no music company under that name, and a full-text search of United States securities filings returned nothing, both of which are expected for a South African label rather than meaningful in themselves. A London company called Sondela Recordings Ltd was checked as a possible post-2021 vehicle and ruled out: its sole director and controlling shareholder is a British national with no established connection to Black Coffee. No post-2021 corporate vehicle for these masters was identified at all.
