Nothing was sold. Since 20 August 2021, every record Mayorkun has released under his own name has carried the same phonogram credit: Sony Music Entertainment West Africa Limited claiming copyright in the recording, under an exclusive licence from a company called Avante Digital Concepts Limited. That is a licence, not an assignment, and the direction of it is the whole story. Avante grants. Sony receives. The Nigerian singer’s earlier catalogue did not travel with him: his Davido Music Worldwide releases, up to and including the December 2020 single “Your Body”, still read Davido Music Worldwide today.
Three separate rights sit inside a sentence like that, and music coverage runs them together constantly: the master right in the recording, the publishing right in the song, and the distribution arrangement that moves the finished file onto a streaming service. Only the first of the three is visible here. The second is invisible. The third is folded into the first, because the company holding the licence is also the label of record at the stores.
What the credit line actually says#
The exact string on the most recent release, the tenth-anniversary single “Kaluba” of 28 August 2026, reads: “℗ 2026 Nigeria - Sony Music Entertainment West Africa Limited, under exclusive license from Avante Digital Concepts Limited.”
It has read that way, with two small variations, on sixteen own-name releases across five years. The 2021 releases name the Sony company as “SM Entertainment West Africa Limited”; from the single “Certified Loner (No Competition)” in June 2022 the name appears in full. The licensor is spelled “Avante Digital concepts limited” until May 2024 and “Avante Digital Concepts Limited” from November 2024. Neither change alters the structure.
Two independent catalogue registries and one rights registry were read directly for this piece. Apple’s artist lookup returned 128 rows spanning April 2016 to August 2026. Deezer’s album endpoints were read individually for the same catalogue. MusicBrainz, a third and separate registry, lists the Sony entity as the label on both the album Back In Office and the album Still The Mayor. All three agree.
Owner, licensee, distributor: three different jobs#
The preposition is doing the legal work. “Under exclusive licence from” means the party named after “from” is the grantor. Avante is the licensor. Sony Music Entertainment West Africa Limited is the licensee, and it also occupies the phonogram claimant position, the slot immediately after the ℗ symbol and the year, which is where the party asserting copyright in the released recording sits.
This is the inverse of the more familiar construction on African catalogues, where the owning imprint is named first and the licensee second. Simi’s releases, for instance, read “Studio Brat, under exclusive license to AWAL Recordings Ltd”. Both forms describe an exclusive licence. They differ only in which party the metadata puts in front. Nothing located explains why this catalogue uses the inverted form, and the difference is not treated here as evidence of a different legal structure.
What can be stated flatly: an exclusive licence exists, Avante grants it, Sony holds it, Sony distributes. What cannot: that Avante owns the masters. A licensor can normally grant only what it controls, and that is the ordinary reading of the sentence, but no document reviewed actually says Avante owns anything. That is an inference from grammar, and it is being flagged as one rather than printed as a fact.
A phonogram line is not a contract. It is a claim filed with a shop. It tells you who asserts copyright in a recording as delivered. It does not tell you what the licence covers, how long it runs, or what was paid for it.
The eight month gap#
The changeover is unusually clean in the metadata. The last Mayorkun release credited to Davido Music Worldwide is “Your Body”, dated 4 December 2020. The first credited to Sony under licence from Avante is “Let Me Know”, dated 20 August 2021. Eight and a half months separate them, with no own-name release in between.
The earlier catalogue stayed put. The 2018 debut album The Mayor of Lagos, the 2019 single “Up To Something”, the 2020 singles “Of Lagos” and “Betty Butter” all still carry “℗ Davido Music Worldwide” on both Apple and Deezer. No reversion, buy-back or re-credit is visible anywhere. Whatever Mayorkun took with him when he left, it was not his first five years of recordings.
One detail on the other side of that line is worth noting because it is easy to misread. Two DMW releases on which Mayorkun is a featured artist, “Prayer” from 2017 and “Mind” from 2018, now read “Davido Music Worldwide Limited, Under Exclusive License to Virgin Music Nigeria”. That is a change on the label’s side of the house and nothing located connects it to Mayorkun’s own arrangement.
What the artist has said, and what he has not#
There has never been an announcement. No press release from either named company, no filing, nothing. A full-text search of United States securities filings returns nothing for either name, which is expected: neither is a registrant.
Mayorkun himself has addressed it twice on the record. In a television interview broadcast in April 2025 he said his contract with the old label “has been done for about 3 to 4 years, but I’m still with them”. In a second television interview in June 2025 he said: “Aside from having my label, right now I’m also with Sony Africa. Shout out to Davido for that as well, he facilitated the deal.”
Read that second quote closely. He confirms two things: that he has his own label, and that Davido helped bring about the Sony arrangement. He does not name Avante Digital Concepts Limited. Nobody has. The assumption that Avante is Mayorkun’s own vehicle is a reasonable one and it is almost certainly right, but it is an assumption, and it has not been sourced to anything. What “facilitated” means commercially, and whether Davido or his company retains any continuing participation in the post-2021 recordings, is not stated anywhere.
One discrepancy worth recording#
On “Kaluba”, the newest release, Deezer’s label field reads “Sound African Recordings” rather than the Sony West Africa entity that appears on every other release since 2021. Apple’s phonogram line on the same record is unchanged. Sound African Recordings is described in a December 2025 label profile as a subsidiary of Sony Music Africa, founded in 2014 and run out of South Africa, so this looks like a routing change inside the Sony group rather than a change of partner. No source says so. It is recorded as an unresolved difference between two registries, not as a new deal.
What could not be established#
Quite a lot, and it should be said plainly rather than filled in.
No money figure exists anywhere. No advance, no royalty rate, no term, no option structure, no equity. “Not disclosed” is the honest entry. No territory is stated either, though the identical credit string was returned from the Nigerian, US, UK, Ghanaian, South African, French, Kenyan and Canadian storefronts when each was queried separately, with no territory-specific alternative licensee anywhere. That is consistent with one worldwide licence. It does not prove one.
Who owns Avante Digital Concepts Limited could not be established. Nigeria’s corporate registry has no public interface available to automated checking and returned an access refusal. The UK register was checked for a same-name entity and returned nothing, but the same search also returned nothing for a control company known to be on that register, so the result is unusable and no conclusion is drawn from it. A same-name UK hit would not have proved anything in any case: similarly named holding vehicles are common and conflating them is exactly the error this desk exists to avoid.
Publishing is a blank. No publisher or administrator for Mayorkun’s compositions appears in any release metadata read, and two performing rights organisation repertory searches were blocked when attempted. Who administers the songs, as opposed to the recordings, is simply not known here.
What this means for artists#
The structure on display is the one a lot of African artists now want and comparatively few get written down correctly. An artist-side company holds the recordings. A major’s regional operating arm takes an exclusive licence to exploit them and does the distribution. When the licence ends, the recordings are still at home. That is a fundamentally different position from signing a recording contract under which the label owns the masters outright and the artist negotiates, years later, for a reversion that may never come.
Three practical points follow. First, the credit line is the cheapest due diligence in the business: if your name is not in it, or your company is not the one named as licensor, find out why before the next release goes out. Second, the difference between “under exclusive licence from” and a straight ownership credit is worth more than most advance offers, and it costs nothing to insist on at the metadata stage. Third, silence is normal. Neither party here has ever announced this arrangement, and the absence of a press release says nothing about whether the deal is good. The document that matters was published on the release page all along.
One caution against over-reading it. A phonogram credit is a claim, not a contract, and a licence structure visible in metadata can still sit on top of terms that are unfavourable in every other respect: the length, the splits, the recoupment, the options. None of those are visible here for anyone.
