Wande Coal Signed With Starstruck Management and EMPIRE in 2019. His New Album King Coal Names Neither.

Apple’s own catalogue metadata for Wande Coal shows a distribution credit that ran unbroken across two projects for four years, then disappeared. From his single Vex in November 2019 through Ebelebe, his October 2023 duet with Wizkid, every solo release checked carried the joint phonogram line “Starstruck Management, Inc. / EMPIRE.” His three most recent releases, including his new 15-track album King Coal, released 26 June 2026, carry a different line: “Starstruck Management, Inc” alone. EMPIRE’s name is gone, and no party has said why.

This was not announced. It shows up only in the (P) line, the phonogram copyright credit every streaming platform requires on every release, and it took a full pull of Wande Coal’s Apple Music catalogue, cross-checked live across the US, UK and Nigerian storefronts, plus a search of EMPIRE’s own smart-link catalogue, to see the shape of it.

What the 2019 signing actually was

Wande Coal spent his first post-Mavin decade releasing through his own imprint, Black Diamond Entertainment, which he launched in 2013 after a public split from Don Jazzy’s label, formally announced by Mavin Records on 7 November 2013. Black Diamond Entertainment carried his 2015 album Wanted and years of singles that followed.

That changed with a deal built around Starstruck Management, Inc., a Los Angeles-based artist management and label-services company founded in 1998 by Joseph “Screwface” Charles, and its distribution partner EMPIRE, the San Francisco indie founded by Ghazi Shami. Starstruck Management is not Wande Coal’s own company. It represents more than 40 artists, songwriters and producers on its own account, according to its own site, and still lists Wande Coal on its current artist roster as of this writing.

The earliest release carrying the joint credit is Vex, out 1 November 2019, produced by Sarz. The formula, “Starstruck Management, Inc. / EMPIRE,” then covers his EP Realms (11 September 2020) and his album Legend or No Legend (18 May 2023) in full. EMPIRE’s own trade coverage treated the signing as a genuine get: in an October 2022 piece in The NATIVE, then-Vice President of A&R Tina Davis called it “an honour to sign Wande Coal,” describing him as “a forefather of the Afro Fusion genre.” No source located, on either side, names a contract term, an advance, a royalty rate or an equity stake. This record does not use the words “joint venture” for the arrangement, because no document found uses them either; both companies’ own public language describes a signing and a distribution partnership.

Where the credit stops

The last release found anywhere in Wande Coal’s catalogue carrying the EMPIRE name is Ebelebe, his collaboration with Wizkid, released 18 October 2023. After that date, the picture gets complicated before it gets clear. A five-track collaborative EP with producer Kel-P, Best of Both Worlds, came out 27 February 2025 under neither company’s name; its credit reads “Jones Worldwide Entertainment Ltd, exclusively distributed by EGA Distro,” which is Kel-P’s own management company, not Wande Coal’s. That release sits outside this record’s scope: it is not evidence the Starstruck/EMPIRE arrangement lapsed, because it was never inside that arrangement to begin with.

The releases that matter are the next three under Wande Coal’s own name. DEM GO PAY, a single released 14 November 2025, carries “Starstruck Management” with no EMPIRE credit. DEARLY, out 13 February 2026 and featuring Qing Madi, carries the same solo Starstruck credit. And King Coal itself, the 15-track album Wande Coal released on 26 June 2026 featuring Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, BNXN, Ruger, Qing Madi and others, reads “Starstruck Management, Inc” on its own, with no EMPIRE line anywhere on the release. All three credits were verified live across the US, UK and Nigerian Apple Music storefronts, and they match across all three.

A search of EMPIRE’s own smart-link catalogue, music.empi.re, turns up individual pages for every prior Wande Coal release checked, Realms, Legend or No Legend, Come My Way, Kpe Paso, Ebelebe, going back to 2019. It returns nothing for DEM GO PAY, DEARLY or King Coal. That is a negative finding, not a confirmed one; EMPIRE’s own indexing could simply be behind. But it points the same direction as the phonogram line.

What neither company has said

No statement from Wande Coal, Starstruck Management or EMPIRE addresses the change. There is no press release announcing an end to the distribution relationship, no interview in which Wande Coal discusses leaving EMPIRE, and no update to EMPIRE’s own public materials noting his departure. The most recent on-record EMPIRE comment about him that this desk located is the October 2022 “forefather of the Afro Fusion genre” line, a year before his last EMPIRE-credited release. Starstruck Management’s own roster page, which does not name EMPIRE at all, still lists him today.

There is a smaller discrepancy worth flagging inside the timeline this desk already trusts. Wikipedia’s article on Legend or No Legend names three labels behind the 2023 album: Starstruck Management, EMPIRE, and Black Diamond Entertainment, Wande Coal’s own earlier imprint. Apple’s own copyright metadata for that same album, read directly for this record, shows only “Starstruck Management / EMPIRE.” Either Apple’s field dropped a credit that appeared elsewhere on the release, or a secondary source added one that the phonogram line does not carry. This record does not resolve which is correct; it flags the gap because getting that kind of detail right matters more, not less, on a catalogue this size.

A MusicBrainz search for a label entity matching Starstruck Management specifically, run for this record, returned nothing; a same-named “Starstruck Records” and an unrelated “Starstruck Entertainment Group” exist in that registry but are not this company. A parallel search for Black Diamond Entertainment also returned zero results. Coverage of African and diaspora independent labels in that registry is uneven, so this desk does not read a rights position into the gap, only a reminder that Apple’s own catalogue metadata, checked storefront by storefront, is doing more work in this record than any third-party registry could.

What this means for artists

The practical lesson is not really about whether Wande Coal and EMPIRE are still working together in some form the credit line does not capture. It is about how little a signing announcement guarantees once the initial run of releases ends. EMPIRE’s own 2022 language, “an honour to sign Wande Coal,” described a real and durable arrangement for four years, verified on this desk’s own reading of the recordings themselves. It does not describe the state of that arrangement today, and nothing public says it should.

For an artist or a manager negotiating a distribution deal with any label, major or independent, the useful question is not what the press release says at signing. It is what happens to the credit line, and to the underlying rights, if either side quietly stops renewing. A distribution agreement that runs release to release, rather than under a single long-form contract with a defined term, can end exactly this way: without a statement, without a dispute, and without anything for a fan or a journalist to find except the small print on the next release. Anyone in Wande Coal’s position, an established artist re-signing after years on their own imprint, should get the wind-down terms in writing before the first single drops, not infer them from a catalogue years later.

It is also a reminder that a management company and a distributor are not the same kind of party, and a catalogue can lose one without losing the other. Starstruck Management’s continued presence, on the credit line and on its own roster page, says the management relationship is intact. EMPIRE’s disappearance from three straight releases says the distribution side is not what it was. Both things are true about the same artist’s catalogue at the same time, and neither company has felt the need to explain either one.