Who Owns Lojay’s Masters? Koratori Music, and the Credit Line Dates the Handover to September 2022

Lojay’s master recordings are not owned by a major label, and they have not been owned by the imprint that broke him since September 2022. The phonogram owner named on every release he has led for the past four years is Koratori Music, the recording arm of a Lagos talent development and management group run by the artist’s own manager. Nobody announced the change. It is visible only in the credit line.

This publication has now read that line in three places independent of each other: Apple’s own catalogue metadata for the artist, Deezer’s album API, and the auto-generated descriptions YouTube builds from whatever a distributor delivers to it. All three agree. XOXO, Lojay’s 14-track debut album released on 10 October 2025, reads “℗ 2025 Koratori Music”. The album page carries no separate copyright line for the publishing, and names no distributor at all.

What changed hands, and when

Apple’s catalogue holds 56 releases credited to Lojay. Read in date order, the phonogram line moves through four distinct eras:

• 2016 to 2020, self-owned. “Kuli Kuli” (1 October 2016), the Midnight Vibes EP (2017), “Over the Bar” (2018) and “Ariel” (2019) all read simply “℗ Lojay”. “Ogogoro” (1 May 2020) reads “℗ 2020 Lojay Music / Sound Genie”.
• April 2021 to July 2022, Metallic and 1789. “Tonongo” (30 April 2021), the Sarz-produced EP LV N ATTN (4 June 2021) and the Chris Brown single “Monalisa” (19 May 2022) all read “℗ Metallic Music/1789”. A remix issued on 1 July 2022 reads “℗ 2022 Metallic Inc/1789”, a different name in the same slot.
• September 2022 onward, Koratori. The single “LEADER!”, released 16 September 2022, is the first Lojay record to read “℗ 2022 KORATORI RECORDINGS”. Every release he has led since carries a Koratori credit.
• October 2024 onward, renamed. From “Falling/Unleash” (11 October 2024) the credit settles on “Koratori Music”, the form still in use on the run of six “Tenner” remixes issued between June and August 2026.

The handover is therefore dated, and it is earlier than the public record generally has it. The commonly repeated version places Lojay’s move to his own imprint at the 2023 EP GANGSTER ROMANTIC. The credit line places it almost six months earlier, on a single released in September 2022.

Two further sources corroborate the two poles independently. Deezer’s album API returns label “Metallic Music/1789” for LV N ATTN (UPC 196006598723, five tracks) and label “Koratori Music” for XOXO (UPC 199538182941, 14 tracks). MusicBrainz holds two separate XOXO releases, both dated 10 October 2025, both 14 tracks, both worldwide, both filed under the label “KORATORI RECORDINGS”.

The credit names no licensee, and that matters

The same Apple dataset that carries Lojay’s own releases also carries the records he guests on, and the contrast is the most useful thing in it. Sarz’s “Billions”, on which Lojay features, reads “℗ 2024 1789 under exclusive license to UnitedMasters LLC”. The Loveless EP with JAE5 reads “℗ 2024 Black Butter Ltd”. “Sensational” with Chris Brown and Davido reads “℗ 2023 Chris Brown Entertainment, LLC, under exclusive license to RCA Records”. The amapiano “Mnike” remix he appears on reads “℗ 2024 South Africa – Sony Music Entertainment Africa (Pty) Ltd under exclusive license from New Money Gang Records”.

Not one Koratori-era Lojay release carries an “under exclusive licence to” clause. Neither did the Metallic and 1789 releases before them. That phrase is the standard way a phonogram line records that the owner has licensed the recording out to someone else, and its absence across an entire four-year run, in a dataset where neighbouring records use it constantly, is a meaningful negative finding. It is not proof. A phonogram line is a delivered metadata field, not a contract, and a label can hold a distribution agreement that never appears in it. But read against its own peers, the credit is consistent with Koratori keeping the recordings rather than licensing them away.

The same reading disposes of a common confusion about features. Lojay’s guest verses do not sit with Koratori. They sit with whoever owns the lead artist’s record, which is why a Lojay vocal can be owned by a Sony subsidiary in Johannesburg, an imprint in London and his own Lagos company in the same twelve months.

Who moves it: The Orchard, on both sides of the change

The distribution question was the hardest to answer from a primary document, because neither Koratori nor its distributor has published anything about it. The answer came from the delivered metadata itself. YouTube’s auto-generated description on the Art Track for “Somebody Like You”, from XOXO, opens: “Provided to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises”, above “℗ 2025 Koratori Music” and “Released on: 2025-10-10”. The Art Track for “Suru”, from the same album, reads identically. So does the Art Track for “Park O X3”, from the 2021 EP, above “℗ 2021 Metallic Music/1789”.

That last one is the finding inside the finding. The Orchard, which is Sony Music Entertainment’s independent distribution arm and runs offices in Lagos, Johannesburg and Nairobi, delivered Lojay’s catalogue to YouTube both before and after the ownership line changed. The label on the masters moved. The pipe into the platforms did not.

Koratori’s own website, captured in November 2024, carries The Orchard’s logo on its partners page, alongside 1789, Universal, Coca-Cola, Chivas Regal, Budweiser and WhatsApp. That page characterises none of those relationships, and a wall that mixes a distributor with two beer and spirits brands cannot be used to establish a rights position for any of them. The Universal logo in particular should not be read as any rights relationship at all.

What the two documents together do establish is narrow and worth stating exactly: The Orchard is the party that delivered these recordings to at least one platform, and Koratori itself names The Orchard as a partner. Neither document states the contractual form, whether that is a distribution agreement, a label services deal or a licence, and neither states its term, its territory, its exclusivity or any revenue split. Those remain unknown.

The publishing changed too, from nobody to Sony Music Publishing

The delivered metadata answers the songwriter question as well, and the answer moved. On “Park O X3” from the 2021 EP, the publisher field reads “Copyright Control”, which is the industry’s placeholder for a work whose publisher was not identified when the recording was delivered. On “Somebody Like You” and “Suru” from the 2025 album, the same field reads “Sony Music Publishing”.

A separate Apple release lends weight to that. “Apple Music Home Session: Lojay”, issued 27 September 2023, carries the unusual phonogram credit “℗ 2023 Sony Music Publishing UK”. Between 2021 and 2023, in other words, a publisher appeared where there had been none. Writer credits on the 2025 tracks name Olalekan Osifeso alongside Osaretin Osabuohen, the producer Sarz, and on “Suru” alongside Elton Chukwumah Chukwuka and Olamide Adedeji.

This is the distinction the beat exists to hold. Masters and publishing are different property, and here they sit with different owners. Koratori holds the recordings. Sony Music Publishing is named as publisher on the compositions. Whether that is an administration deal, a co-publishing deal or an assignment cannot be told from a metadata field, and no party has said.

What could not be established

No consideration is recorded here because none is public. No advance, royalty rate, equity stake or cash figure has been disclosed by any party, and none should be assumed.

Koratori’s legal entity could not be found. A Companies House search for “Koratori” returns no results. Nigeria’s corporate register offers no public API and its search site refused requests from this server. The company’s own domain would not complete a TLS handshake, so the evidence used here is an archived capture of its site, which describes it in its own words as “a rising talent development and management agency based in Lagos Nigeria” whose group “is made up of entities”, names Anthony Egwu as Founder and Manager, and lists exactly two artists: Lojay and Tomi Thomas. Whether Lojay himself holds equity in the company that owns his masters is unknown. Whether “KORATORI RECORDINGS” and “Koratori Music” are one legal entity is an assumption resting on a continuous catalogue, not a document.

Metallic is thinner still. It exists in the record as a name on a credit, in three spellings, with no register entry, no jurisdiction and no named officer. Its partner in that credit is documented: 1789 is registered in London as 1789 Entertainment Ltd, company number 13200014, incorporated 15 February 2021, and its sole controlling person on the public register is Sarz, who produced the EP the credit sits on. What the slash between “Metallic Music” and “1789” actually divided is not disclosed anywhere. Two performing rights society repertory searches were attempted to corroborate the publishing; both refused automated requests.

What this means for artists

Lojay’s catalogue is a working template for something Nigerian artists are asked about constantly and rarely shown: how you move from someone else’s imprint to your own without a lawsuit, a public falling out or a buy-back announcement. The mechanics here were undramatic. One era of releases ends, the next begins under a different phonogram line, the distributor stays the same, and the artist keeps releasing. 1789 is still on his label’s partner wall two years later.

Three practical lessons sit in the documents. First, the phonogram line is the single most useful piece of public information about who owns a recording, and it is free. Any artist can read their own, and any artist can read a prospective label’s back catalogue before signing. The presence or absence of “under exclusive licence to” in that line tells you whether the named owner kept the master or handed it to someone else to exploit.

Second, owning your masters and controlling your distribution are separate achievements. Koratori appears to have the first. The second still runs through a Sony-owned distributor, which is a perfectly normal and often sensible arrangement, and is also the reason a self-owned imprint is not the same thing as independence from the majors. Producer-owned imprints across the continent solve this differently: the model on Sarz’s own 1789, distributed by UnitedMasters, is a fee-based route where the artist keeps the masters; a distribution agreement with a major-owned aggregator is a different trade, usually a revenue share for wider reach and services.

Third, publishing lags masters, and it lags them badly. For two years the delivered metadata on Lojay’s breakout EP told every platform that its compositions had no identified publisher. Money does not stop flowing in that situation, but it slows, it pools and it sometimes goes unclaimed. An artist who fixes the recording side and leaves the writing side on placeholder metadata has fixed half the problem.

The structure Koratori has built around Lojay and Tomi Thomas also shows what a Lagos company can do without outside capital: a management arm, a recording arm, and the Higher Vibrations live series that has run since 2017 and has put Tems, Lady Donli, Buju, Santi, Odunsi, Minz and Lojay himself on the same small stages. That is an ecosystem argument rather than a label argument, and it is the argument the company makes about itself. What it has not made public is who owns it.

Read the deal sheet below for the full source list, including the Apple, Deezer, MusicBrainz and YouTube metadata this record is drawn from, the archived Koratori site, and the Companies House register entries checked.