Since 24 July 2026, every lead single released by GIMS has carried the same sentence at the bottom of its metadata: “℗ 2026 Black Belt, under exclusive distribution to AllPoints, a division of Believe.”
That line is the only public record that one of the largest Francophone artists in the world, born Gandhi Djuna in Kinshasa, has moved his new recordings into the distribution pipe of Believe, the Paris company that was taken private by its founder, EQT and TCV in August 2025. No party announced it. No press release exists. There is no filing, because none of the companies involved is a registrant anywhere that publishes deal documents.
So we went to what does exist: the phonogram credit line on 152 releases, and the French national company register.
What actually changed hands#
A distribution relationship, and the name of the entity credited as owning the recordings. Nothing reviewed says the masters themselves were sold, and the credit line says the opposite: it names Black Belt as the ℗ holder and AllPoints only as the distributor. Those are different legal positions. A distributor moves product and collects money on someone else’s copyright. An owner holds the copyright. The line asserts the first and not the second, and this publication is not going to blur them.
Here is the trail, in order, taken from the catalogue metadata itself rather than from anyone’s summary of it.
From 2013 to 2016 the credit read ℗ Wati-B, and from 2015 onward “under exclusive licence to Sony Music Entertainment France SAS”. Wati-B was the label of the Sexion d’Assaut era. That was a licence: Wati-B held the recordings, Sony exploited them.
On 12 May 2017 the single Marabout arrived credited simply ℗ Chahawat. No licensee, no distributor, nobody else on the line. Chahawat is a real French company: a SAS, SIREN 813610268, incorporated 10 September 2015, principal activity 59.20Z, sound recording and music publishing, registered at 42 rue de Maubeuge in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Its registered President is Gandhi Djuna, born May 1986. The whole Ceinture noire album cycle, through to the Décennie edition of December 2019, sits under that credit.
Then, on 31 August 2020, the line changed completely: ℗ Géante Rouge / Indifference Prod / Play Two distributed by Sony Music Entertainment France SAS. Sony was back, as distributor rather than licensee, and two other names had joined. That configuration held through the albums LE FLÉAU and L’EMPIRE DE MÉROÉ.
From 30 September 2022 Sony disappeared from the line and it read GÉANTE ROUGE / PLAY TWO. From 26 April 2024 most lead releases read GÉANTE ROUGE alone, including the album LE NORD SE SOUVIENT. The last release credited to Géante Rouge was the single BLOQUÉ on 7 November 2025.
Three weeks later, on 28 November 2025, the single Bonbon appeared credited ℗ 2025 Black Belt Music. No distributor named. That silence held for eight months across a run of singles, and then on 24 July 2026 FANTAISIE arrived with AllPoints on the line, followed by DÉSACCORD on 28 August and BONNIE on 18 September.
The company that is not there#
Géante Rouge held, or at least was credited on, five years of one of France’s biggest catalogues. It is not registered as a company in France.
We searched the national company register for Géante Rouge and for Geante Rouge, and found no entity under that name in sound recording and music publishing, or in music publishing, or in artistic creation, or in performing arts. The closest name match, LA COMPAGNIE DE LA GEANTE ROUGE, SIREN 893885293, is a performing arts company incorporated in January 2021, and nothing we reviewed connects it to the recordings. That is not a small gap. It means the legal owner of the GIMS masters released between 2020 and late 2025 cannot be identified from public French records. It could be a trading name used by a registered company under a different legal name, which is entirely lawful and common. We simply cannot say which one, and we are not going to guess.
Black Belt is a narrower question with a more interesting shape. Exactly one company is registered in France under the name Black Belt Music: a SAS, SIREN 941758039, activity 59.20Z, incorporated on 6 March 2025, registered office on Rue Elie Lacroix in Saint-Claude, Guadeloupe, President Thierry Amiens, born September 1972. It was incorporated eight months before the first Black Belt credit appeared, in the correct industry sector, under the exact name.
That is suggestive and it is not proof. We have found no document connecting that company to GIMS, and no document connecting Thierry Amiens to him either. The name is also, in English, the title of the 2018 album Ceinture noire, which is the kind of detail that makes a reporter want to close the loop and is precisely why the loop should stay open until a document closes it.
AllPoints, meanwhile, has no French registration at all, which is consistent with it being a brand rather than a separate legal person. Believe’s own corporate site settles what it is: describing Henri Jamet, Managing Director of Believe France, it says he “has built and developed the label division, leading the AllPoints and naïve labels before launching Animal63 and All Night Long”. AllPoints sits in Believe’s own published list of its labels. The credit line’s phrase, “a division of Believe”, matches what Believe says about itself.
Two brothers, one address#
One registry detail is worth putting on the record because it shows how this family of companies is arranged. 42 rue de Maubeuge, 75009 Paris is the registered office of Chahawat. It is also the registered office of AMATERASU PROD, SIREN 829649235, incorporated April 2017, President Dadju Nsungula, and of AMATERASU EDITIONS, SIREN 844832337, incorporated December 2018, same President. Dadju is GIMS’s younger brother, and Amaterasu or Amaterasu Prod appears on the phonogram line of essentially every Dadju lead release from 2017 to 2024, including the 2024 album HÉRITAGE with Tayc.
In 2018 the single Bella ciao carried the line ℗ Play Two / Chahawat / Amaterasu Prod / Indifference Prod, putting both brothers’ own companies on the same record alongside the same two partners GIMS would later be credited with from 2020.
There is also a closed company. MONSTRE MARIN CORPORATION, SIREN 795004084, incorporated August 2013, activity 59.20Z, President Gandhi Djuna, Directeur Général Stéphane Espinosa, with Deloitte & Associés as statutory auditor. It was administratively closed with effect from 31 December 2019, within weeks of the last Chahawat-credited release. Appointing a Big Four auditor means the company crossed French audit thresholds at some point. We did not review its accounts.
What this means for artists#
Three practical lessons sit inside this, and none of them requires you to care about GIMS.
First, the ℗ line is a legal statement and most artists treat it as decoration. It names who claims the recording and, when it says so, who distributes it. If your name is not on it and you believe you own your masters, that is a conversation to have now rather than at renewal.
Second, “distributed by” and “under exclusive licence to” are not synonyms, and the difference is money. Across this one catalogue the structure moved from a licence to Sony, to self-owned with no partner named, to a distribution arrangement with Sony, to a distribution arrangement with Believe. Each of those splits revenue differently and each returns a different amount of control at the end of the term. An artist negotiating Francophone or pan-African distribution should ask which of the four they are being offered, in writing.
Third, and least comfortable: an artist of this scale can move his entire release pipeline between two of the largest distributors in Europe with no announcement and no traceable owning entity for the previous five years of masters. If the register cannot tell you who owned those recordings, it cannot tell a collecting society, a licensee, or an heir either. Independent African and diaspora artists building their own label vehicles should register them properly and keep the credit line accurate, because the credit line and the register are what will be read when someone eventually needs to know who owns the song.
What we could not establish#
No consideration, advance, royalty rate, term or territory has been published for the AllPoints arrangement by anyone. Whether the registered Black Belt Music SAS in Guadeloupe is the Black Belt on the credit line is not established. Thierry Amiens’s relationship to GIMS, if any, is not established. Who owns Géante Rouge is not established. The publisher or administrator of the underlying compositions is a separate question this piece does not answer. And because the Black Belt credits from November 2025 to July 2026 name no distributor at all, we cannot say from these documents when the AllPoints arrangement actually began, only when it first appeared in writing.
The full sourcing, including every registry entry and the exact credit strings, sits in our deal record for this transaction. For the wider pattern of majors restructuring Francophone operations, see our records on Universal Music France and Def Jam Africa and on Warner’s 2024 Francophone Africa launch.
