In May 2021, Mdundo told its shareholders it had signed Davido Music Worldwide. The headline on the filing called it a distribution agreement. The body of the same filing called it a licensing agreement. Those are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole story: Mdundo bought permission to carry DMW’s recordings, not the recordings themselves, and not the job of taking them to market.
Mdundo.com A/S is listed on Nasdaq First North Growth Market Denmark, which means the Kenyan-headquartered streaming company has to tell a regulator things that African music companies almost never have to tell anyone. On 3 May 2021 at 09:25 CEST it filed Company Announcement No. 5-2021. The operative sentence reads: “Mdundo has entered into a licensing agreement with Davido Music Worldwide (DMW) to distribute the catalogue on the platform.”
Read that slowly. The verb that governs the relationship is “licensing.” The word “distribute” describes what Mdundo will then do on its own service, which is what a streaming platform does with everything it carries. It does not make Mdundo DMW’s distributor in the sense the industry uses that word, and it transfers no ownership of any master recording or any composition.
What the filing actually discloses#
The announcement is short, around 300 words. It names two artists as the commercial draw: Mayorkun and Peruzzi, the latter spelled “Perruzzi” in the original. It states that Mdundo also holds rights arrangements with Warner Music Group, Believe Digital, Tunecore and Africori. It identifies Nigeria as a focus market, cites more than 100,000 African musicians signed directly to the platform, and describes a monthly active user ambition moving from roughly 7 million toward 18 million. Francis Muchina, Mdundo’s Head of A&R, is quoted.
What it does not disclose is everything a dealmaker would want to know. No consideration. No advance. No minimum guarantee. No per-stream rate or revenue split. No territory. No term.
The agreement is confirmed a second time in a document with an auditor’s signature on it. Mdundo’s annual report for the 2020/21 financial year, audited by Grant Thornton, states: “During the financial year, Mdundo entered into agreements with three of Africa’s leading record companies; Davido Music Worldwide (DMW), Jungle Entertainment and Keygaard.” The same report supplies the rationale in one line: “DMW is expected to have 20% of Top 50 music hits in Nigeria currently.”
That is the high-water mark of the paper trail. Davido Music Worldwide is not named in any Mdundo document after it.
Owns, administers, distributes, licenses#
Four words get used interchangeably in music coverage and they describe four different legal positions.
To own a master is to hold the copyright in the sound recording. To administer is to collect and account for income on someone else’s copyright. To distribute is to supply a catalogue into retail and streaming on the owner’s behalf, usually for a fee or a share. To license is to grant a defined permission to use recordings you continue to own, for a period, in a territory, on terms.
What the filing describes is the fourth. DMW stayed the owner. Mdundo got a permission. The headline reached for the third word because “distribution agreement” sounds bigger, and a company announcing good news to a growth market has every incentive to reach for the bigger word. This is not unique to Mdundo, and conflating the two is the most common error in reporting on African music deals.
The practical consequence is that a licence like this can simply stop. It has an end date, even if nobody publishes it. The catalogue does not move, because it never moved in the first place.
Both named artists had already left DMW#
Here is where the phonogram credit lines, the small print beginning with the circled P symbol, do the work that the press release will not.
Mayorkun’s last release checked carrying a DMW phonogram credit is “Betty Butter,” issued 3 July 2020. By “Let Me Know,” issued 20 August 2021, the line reads “Nigeria, SM Entertainment West Africa Limited, under exclusive licence from Avante Digital concepts limited.” Avante Digital Concepts is Mayorkun’s own company. Later releases put Sony Music Entertainment West Africa Limited in the same slot.
Peruzzi’s last release checked carrying a DMW credit is “Isolova,” issued 9 November 2020. “Sweetah,” issued 10 November 2021, reads simply “2021 Peruzzi.” By 2023, “Pressure” reads “2023 Peruzzi, with exclusive license to ONErpm.”
Mayorkun put it plainly himself in an April 2025 interview: “My contract with DMW has been done for about 3 to 4 years, but I’m still with them.” In the same conversation he confirmed three years with Sony Music.
So both artists Mdundo named had ended their DMW recording relationship within months of the announcement. That sounds damning and it is not, quite. A catalogue licence covers recordings that already exist. Mayorkun leaving DMW in 2021 does not retract “Betty Butter” from DMW’s ownership. What it does mean is that the future pipeline the announcement was implicitly selling, new Mayorkun and Peruzzi records arriving through DMW, did not arrive.
Where DMW’s rights actually sit#
Davido Music Worldwide has cycled through exclusive licensees at a pace that makes the point about how these arrangements work. Its credit lines name Virgin Music Nigeria across 2012 to 2019 and again in November 2025, emPawa Africa Limited in 2020, and Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited from 2021 through 5ive in 2025 and Oriadé in 2026. Through all of it the named owner on the line stays the same: Davido Music Worldwide Limited. That is what ownership looks like versus what a licence looks like, set out on the same label copy. We have traced that line in detail elsewhere, and looked at a later Davido announcement that never reached a copyright line at all.
What Mdundo’s books say about licences#
Mdundo has to publish numbers, and its accounting policy defines direct costs, in every annual report checked, as “royalties, licenses and other costs directly related to revenue.” On a group basis: 2020/21 revenue DKK 2,299,740 against direct costs of DKK 1,155,855; 2021/22, DKK 7,257,986 against DKK 3,735,745; 2022/23, DKK 12,590,290 against DKK 6,318,226; 2023/24, DKK 11,928,573 against DKK 5,836,917; 2024/25, DKK 10,965,458 against DKK 5,844,702.
Roughly half of revenue goes out as rights cost, consistently, for five years. None of it is broken out by counterparty, so no part of it can be attributed to DMW.
The 2024/25 report describes a shift. Kenya headcount fell from 18 to 12, “redirecting the focus from licensing operations and marketing activities towards product development and sales execution.” The catalogue is described as “839k directly from artists, complemented by 3.9 million licensed global tracks.” Royalty distributions to artists exceeded DKK 4.8m. The company that spent 2021 announcing label signings spent 2025 announcing that it had moved staff off licensing. Its capital story has moved too, most recently through a rights issue.
What could not be established#
The licence’s term, territory, consideration and royalty basis could not be established. Whether it was renewed or has lapsed could not be established. Across all 93 Mdundo company announcements filed between 17 August 2020 and 2 July 2026, exactly one headline names Davido Music Worldwide, and it is the 2021 one. Only one other announcement in that whole run is a rights-holder signing, the Universal Music Group agreement of 2022.
That absence proves nothing on its own. Mdundo may have had no obligation to announce the expiry of one unpriced catalogue licence among several. Checked on 16 September 2026, DMW-era recordings are still served on Mdundo, including “Betty Butter,” “Mama,” “True ft Kizz Daniel,” “Bobo feat. Davido,” “Majesty” and “Somebody Baby.” But Mdundo carries direct artist uploads alongside label licences and does not show which route a track took, so their presence is not proof the 2021 licence subsists.
Davido Music Worldwide Limited itself is not traceable to a public register. UK Companies House returns no company of that name, and Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission has no public search facility. Its jurisdiction of incorporation is unconfirmed.
What this means for artists#
A platform announcement is not a rights event. When a streaming service says it has signed your label, nothing about who owns your recordings has changed. Someone has bought permission to play them. Ask your label which of the four words applies before you celebrate.
Read the body, not the headline, even on a regulatory filing. A company announcing to a stock market still writes its own headline, and the headline is marketing. The sentence that binds is in the text.
Being named in a deal you are not party to carries no benefit. Mayorkun and Peruzzi were the two names used to sell this agreement to Mdundo’s shareholders. Neither was a signatory. Neither, on the public record, received anything for the use of their names, and both had left the label relationship within months.
Licences expire quietly. Unlike an acquisition, a catalogue licence ending produces no announcement, no filing and often no visible change on the platform. If you want to know whether your recordings are still licensed somewhere, the only reliable answer comes from your own statements, not from the platform’s news page.
The credit line outlasts the press release. Five years on, the most durable evidence of who held what is not the announcement. It is the phonogram line on the release page, which is free to check and which nobody rewrites.
The full sourced record, including every document read for this piece, is in our deal database.
