The announcement said every Davido Music Worldwide artist would move to Nine+ Records. The copyright line on Peruzzi’s own records, which is where control of a master recording actually shows up, has been saying something else since 2021.
In April 2024, Davido announced that Davido Music Worldwide was being wound down and that every artist on its roster would move to Nine+ Records, a venture he had launched that same week in partnership with UnitedMasters. A Nigerian entertainment outlet carried the statement in his own words, “All dmw artists would be moved to Nine+ records …. Clearing the air!”, and printed the roster. Peruzzi was on it.
Eighteen months later, in October 2025, Peruzzi released an album. The phonogram credit on it reads: “℗ 2025 Peruzzi, under exclusive license to ONErpm”. Not Nine+ Records. Not UnitedMasters. Not Davido Music Worldwide.
On the evidence of the credit line, nothing changed hands. That is the finding, and it is worth stating carefully, because the more interesting part is not that the move failed to show up. It is that Peruzzi’s masters had already left the Davido Music Worldwide credit line nearly two and a half years before the move was announced.
Why the copyright line is the document that matters#
The small print at the foot of a release page is not decoration. The symbol ℗ marks the phonogram right, the copyright in a sound recording as distinct from the copyright in the underlying song. The name after it is the party asserting ownership of that recording. Where a second name follows the words “under exclusive license to” or “with exclusive license to”, that second party is a licensee: it has been granted exclusive rights to exploit the recording, usually for distribution, but it does not own it.
This is the distinction that most coverage of African music collapses. Owning a master, administering it, distributing it and licensing it are four different legal positions, and a credit line that reads “℗ 2025 Peruzzi, under exclusive license to ONErpm” describes a specific one: Peruzzi holds the recording copyright, and ONErpm has an exclusive licence to exploit it. An artist in that position has not sold anything. He has rented out distribution.
The trail, in order#
Five releases, each credit line transcribed directly from the release page:
- 2021, “Rum & Boogie”: ℗ 2021 Davido Music Worldwide. The label is the named phonogram owner.
- November 2021, “Sweetah”: ℗ 2021 Peruzzi. Davido Music Worldwide is gone from the line. Peruzzi alone is named.
- August 2022, “Hypertension / Things I Need”: ℗ 2022 Peruzzi, with exclusive license to ONErpm. The first appearance of ONErpm, on a master he himself is credited with owning.
- March 2023, “Pressure” featuring Fireboy DML: ℗ 2023 Peruzzi, with exclusive license to ONErpm. The arrangement holds.
- October 2025, “SABALI”: ℗ 2025 Peruzzi, under exclusive license to ONErpm. Eighteen months after the announced move.
Read as a sequence, the April 2024 announcement lands in the middle of a settled arrangement rather than at the start of a new one. By the time Davido said the roster would move, Peruzzi’s releases had carried no Davido Music Worldwide credit for roughly twenty-nine months, and had named ONErpm as exclusive licensee for roughly twenty.
The ownership was contested long before any of this#
There is earlier history that makes the 2021 change less surprising. In August 2018, the head of a Lagos label, Golden Boy Entertainment, publicly claimed that he had signed Peruzzi in 2017 to a three-year contract, that Peruzzi was his artist rather than Davido Music Worldwide’s, and that the records Peruzzi had worked on since late 2017 were his. A Davido Music Worldwide manager responded that Golden Boy was in a partnership with the label and that Davido had offered to settle in instalments.
That dispute was never resolved in any document we could find, and we make no finding on its merits. What it establishes is narrower and still useful: the question of who owned Peruzzi’s recordings was contested by a third party six years before the Nine+ Records announcement, and a label appearing on a credit line is not the same as a label whose claim is uncontested.
A public denial that does not match the paperwork#
In July 2022, Peruzzi publicly responded to a fan asking whether he was still with Davido. He denied any split and, as the report of it puts it, said he was committed to Davido for the rest of his life. His own wording is reproduced on that page as a screenshot rather than as text, so we are relying on the outlet’s summary of it, and we flag that rather than presenting a quotation we could not transcribe.
What matters is the date. That statement sits between the November 2021 release on which the Davido Music Worldwide credit disappeared and the August 2022 release on which ONErpm first appeared. At the moment he was publicly denying a split, his own releases had already stopped naming the label as the owner of his recordings.
Those two things can both be true without anyone having lied. Loyalty to a person is not the same as a recording agreement, a credit line can change for administrative reasons, and a management or A&R relationship can survive a change in who owns a master. But the contradiction is real, it is on the record, and smoothing it over would be the easier and worse choice. We record it without resolving it.
What the official announcement actually said#
There is a second gap worth naming. The partnership between Davido’s Nine+ Records venture and UnitedMasters was announced through UnitedMasters’ own newsroom in April 2024. That page no longer resolves at its original address, but an archived capture of it can still be read in full.
It does not name Peruzzi. It does not name any individual artist as moving. It announces a partnership in general terms, describing artist development, A&R and brand and sync support. The claim that Peruzzi specifically was part of the move comes from Davido’s own social media statement as reported by Nigerian entertainment press, and from nowhere else that we could find.
So the strongest version of the story is narrower than the headlines were: a named principal said the roster would move, and a corporate press release announcing the underlying partnership declined to list anybody.
What could not be established#
We could not establish when, or whether, Peruzzi’s recording agreement with Davido Music Worldwide ended, or on what terms. No filing, registry entry or statement from any party addresses it. A phonogram credit evidences an asserted control position. It is not a contract and it does not disclose one.
We could not establish the terms of the ONErpm arrangement: no territory, no term, no royalty rate, no advance. The credit line says “exclusive license” and stops there.
We could not corroborate any of this through an open rights registry. A direct query for the October 2025 album returned no results at all. A broader search on the artist returned two releases, neither of them that album, and neither carrying a label entity for ONErpm, Davido Music Worldwide or Nine+ Records. That is a gap in registry coverage of Nigerian independent releases, not a gap in the research, and it is a recurring problem for anyone trying to verify African rights positions from public data.
Nine+ Records itself remains unverified as a corporate entity in our directory: no corporate registration found, no roster confirmed by any party, and no release carrying the label’s credit.
None of this means Peruzzi definitively left Davido Music Worldwide, that the announced move was abandoned, or that he will stay with ONErpm. It means the announced move has not appeared on a single one of his master recordings in the eighteen months since, and that the position his credit line describes predates the announcement by twenty months.
What this means for artists#
Three practical points, none of them specific to this case.
First, the credit line is the closest thing to a public register of master ownership that African music has. There is no searchable filing system for most Nigerian label deals, so the ℗ line is often the only document a third party can read. If you are an artist, check what yours says, on every release, and check it again after any change of distributor. If it names a party you do not believe owns your recordings, that is a problem to raise now rather than during a catalogue sale.
Second, “exclusive license to” is a materially better position than having a label named as the phonogram owner. In the first case you own the asset and have granted rights for a term. In the second, somebody else owns it and you are negotiating to get it back. Artists routinely describe both as “my distribution deal”. They are not the same thing, and the difference is the value of your catalogue.
Third, an announcement is not a transaction. Rosters get announced as moving and do not move. Labels get announced as dissolved and keep appearing on credit lines. Until the change shows up on a document that a third party can read, the only thing that has been established is that somebody said something. Anyone valuing a catalogue, clearing a sample, or signing a deal on the strength of a press cycle should be asking for the paperwork.
The full sourced record, including every credit line transcribed and every source checked, is in our deal record for this transaction.
