Sony Music Publishing West Africa Said the Fuji Legends’ Catalogue Had “Found a New Home” in August 2024. The Company That Says It Manages Barrister’s Works, and Cleared Every Sample, Is DMCE.

On 20 August 2024, Sony Music Publishing West Africa said it would represent the works of five of Nigeria’s most sampled catalogues: the fuji artists K1 De Ultimate, Saheed Osupa and Adewale “Mr Johnson” Ayuba, the late Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, and the late indigenous rapper Dagrin. On social media the same company described it differently, saying “the catalogue of the legends has found a new home at Sony Music Publishing.” Those phrases describe different legal events, and no document this desk has read says which one occurred. Eleven months later a second company, the Lagos rights firm DMCE, stated publicly that it manages and protects Barrister’s works, that it brokered the Sony arrangement, and that it cleared the samples.

What changed hands, on the documents

What is documented is a publishing arrangement announced on 20 August 2024 covering the compositions of five Nigerian catalogues. No consideration was disclosed. No term was disclosed. No territory was specified, which is a notable omission given the announcing entity is a regional arm and its parent operates worldwide. No document read for this record states that any master recording changed hands, and none states that copyright in any composition was assigned.

The verb in the trade report is “represent.” The company’s own phrase is not a verb at all: a catalogue that has “found a new home” could have been sold, assigned, administered or merely signed for representation. Promotional language is not a rights description, and the gap between the two is the question this record turns on.

Own, administer, license, distribute

These are four different relationships and the difference decides who gets paid. To own a composition is to hold its copyright: an owner can sell it, license it, and keep the publisher’s share permanently. To administer is to register the work, license it, collect the income and remit it to the owner for a commission, usually for a fixed term after which the catalogue reverts, with the writer or estate remaining the owner throughout. To license is to grant a defined permission for a defined period and territory. To distribute concerns recordings, not compositions, and is a different business.

Sony Music Publishing’s own language elsewhere in Nigeria is precise in a way the fuji announcement is not. In a deal announced on 12 June 2025 covering the highlife artist Bright Chimezie, the wording is explicit: Sony Music Publishing “will administer and consolidate Chimezie’s extensive catalog of classic recordings and compositions.” Administer. The company’s Nigeria managing director, Godwin Tom, added that the company was “honored to bring his extraordinary catalog into our family,” which is again a metaphor rather than a rights term, but the operative verb in that announcement is administration, not acquisition.

Because the August 2024 fuji announcement contains no equivalent verb, this desk cannot state that Sony Music Publishing owns the fuji catalogues, and cannot state that it merely administers them. Both remain consistent with the public record. Anyone reporting either as fact is going beyond the documents.

The intermediary nobody announced

On 14 December 2023, eight months before the fuji announcement, Sony Music Publishing Nigeria announced a partnership with Digital Music Commerce and Exchange Limited, or DMCE, a Lagos company working in intellectual property valuation, licensing and content acquisition. That announcement named no rights, no territory, no term and no money.

On 22 July 2025, after a documentary about Barrister by a Florida International University historian was removed from YouTube on a copyright complaint, DMCE issued a statement considerably more specific than either announcement. It said: “Long before and since the partnership with Sony Music Publishing Nigeria, DMCE has been actively and diligently managing and protecting Barrister’s musical works and legacy.” It said: “In fact, we played a pivotal role in facilitating the collaboration with Sony Music Publishing Nigeria.” It said Barrister’s estate “is significantly benefiting from the monetization of his works, a process we’ve actively managed.” And it said it had cleared the Barrister samples used in FirstKlaz’s “Gen-Z Fuji,” Zinoleesky’s “Fuji Garbage” and Falz’s “No Less,” as well as releases by Barry Jhay and Barryshowkey.

Sample clearance is an administrative act performed by whoever controls licensing of the underlying work. DMCE’s statement therefore describes DMCE, not Sony Music Publishing, performing the day-to-day publishing administration function on the Barrister catalogue, continuously, both before and after the arrangement attributed to Sony.

This is a contradiction in emphasis rather than a flat conflict of fact. Both can be true: a rights company can administer a catalogue on the ground while a major publisher holds a higher-tier agreement over it, and “facilitating the collaboration” is consistent with DMCE acting as the estate’s representative in a deal with Sony rather than as its counterparty. But neither company has published a document saying which of them holds what.

Where the recordings sit

Publishing covers compositions. Master recordings are a separate copyright, and on the registry evidence they never went near this transaction. A rights registry search returns three Barrister releases with label data attached: “New Fuji Garbage,” dated 1991, on Globe Style with catalogue number CDORB 067; “Omo Nigeria,” dated 5 July 2013, on African Songs, Ltd.; and “Tala Disco ’85” on Omo Aje Sound Studio with catalogue number OLPS 1323. Three different companies, none of them Sony, none of them DMCE.

That coverage is thin and should be read as such. The same registry returns one release for Saheed Osupa carrying no label at all, and none whatsoever for K1 De Ultimate or Dagrin, which reflects poor registry coverage of Nigerian catalogue rather than an absence of recordings. What it does establish is that Barrister’s masters were historically issued by named third parties, and that nothing in the announcement claims to have moved them.

What could not be established

Whether Sony Music Publishing owns or administers the five catalogues could not be established: no announcement read uses a verb of transfer, and the company’s own newsroom, fetched directly, returned no page text naming these catalogues or the West African operation. Consideration, term and territory are all undisclosed, and “not disclosed” is the only accurate answer available on each.

The legal relationship between DMCE and Sony Music Publishing Nigeria could not be established, because the December 2023 announcement names no rights and neither company has said whether DMCE is a sub-publisher, an administrator, an agent for the estates or a service vendor. Whether K1 De Ultimate and Saheed Osupa, both living, contracted individually or through DMCE could not be established. Who filed the YouTube complaint could not be established; the report does not say, the historian attributed his difficulty to “disagreement within the family,” and no party has claimed it. Performing-rights and mechanical registries that would name the publisher of record were unreachable from this desk, and DMCE’s own website served an empty shell containing only the company name.

What this means for artists

The first lesson is about reading announcements. “Found a new home,” “joins the family” and “partners with” are marketing phrases with no legal content. The words that matter are narrow and boring: assigns, administers, licenses, distributes, for how long, and in which territory. When an announcement contains none of them, an artist or an estate cannot tell from it what they have agreed to, and neither can anyone else. Sony Music Publishing showed ten months later, in the Bright Chimezie announcement, that it is perfectly capable of naming the verb. Its absence here is information.

The second lesson concerns heritage catalogues, and Adewale Ayuba articulated it himself. “I have a talent to sing, but I don’t have the talent to manage myself,” he said of the arrangement. “You must have a financial side taking care of your income, and that is exactly what Sony is here to do for us.” That is an accurate description of why administration deals exist, and also precisely the moment at which an artist most needs the term sheet read to them. A catalogue that has been generating uncollected income for thirty years is at its most valuable, and its owner at their least informed, on the day a major publisher arrives.

The third lesson is about estates. Dagrin died in 2010 aged 25; Barrister died the same year. Their catalogues are now controlled by families, and the documentary takedown shows what happens when a family holds more than one view about who speaks for the work. Dagrin’s sister, Oluwabukola Olaonipekun, put the appeal of a single counterparty plainly: “At least we know we are under one company, and we are very happy about it.” Consolidation genuinely does solve the problem of a scattered catalogue, but only if the family knows which company is the one company. On the Barrister catalogue, two companies have now publicly described themselves as managing the works.

Limits of this record: the August 2024 announcement, the five names and the quotations from the company’s social media, from Adewale Ayuba and from Oluwabukola Olaonipekun come from a pan-African music industry publication’s report of 20 August 2024, read in full, which is also the source for the 2022 Lagos office opening. The December 2023 DMCE partnership comes from the same publication’s report of 14 December 2023, read in full. The Bright Chimezie administration wording and Godwin Tom’s quotation come from a Nigerian national newspaper’s report of 12 June 2025, read in full. DMCE’s statement is reproduced verbatim in a Nigerian legal news site’s report of 22 July 2025, read in full, which is also the source for the documentary takedown. The three Barrister label credits and catalogue numbers come from an open rights registry queried directly on 12 September 2026. No party has published an agreement, and no figure of any kind appears in any document read.