Makhadzi walked away from Open Mic Productions in 2023 and started releasing through her own company. The recordings she made in the three years before that did not go with her. As at 30 September 2026 the ownership credit on four albums, 74 album tracks, still reads Open Mic Productions. What she took was her bookings. What she left was her catalogue.
This distinction gets lost almost every time an African artist leaves a label, and it is the difference between a career reset and a career restart.
What actually changed hands in 2023#
On 3 May 2023 Makhadzi confirmed she was not renewing her contract with Open Mic Productions. Her own words, from a statement issued that day: “I have taken a decision to not renew the contract with Open Mic Productions so I can focus on my own company Makhadzi Entertainment and other business ventures.” And, specifically: “From now on, all bookings will be handled by my own company Makhadzi Entertainment.”
Bookings. Not masters. Nothing she said that day, and nothing Open Mic has said since, makes any claim about who owns the recordings.
The registries settle that question, and they settle it the other way. Every commercial release carries a phonogram credit, the circled P line, which names the owner of the sound recording. It is delivered with the record by whoever registers it and published unchanged on the storefronts. It is not a contract, but it is the parties’ own statement of their positions, and it is the strongest evidence of master ownership that is routinely available to anyone outside the deal.
Three credit lines, in order#
Reading her full catalogue on 30 September 2026 across Apple, Deezer and MusicBrainz, the credit moves three times in nine years.
| Credited owner | Period | Releases |
|---|---|---|
| Rita Dee Entertainment | 4 May 2017 to 1 November 2019 | 9 |
| Open Mic Productions | 9 October 2020 to 9 June 2023 | 16 as lead artist, plus 18 as a featured artist |
| Makhadzi Entertainment | 26 May 2023 to 28 August 2026 | 47 |
The Open Mic block is the one that matters. Those sixteen lead releases include four albums: Kokovha, 21 tracks, 2020. African Queen, 21 tracks, 2021. Pain Ya Jealous, 10 tracks, 2022. African Queen 2.0, 22 tracks, 2022. Seventy-four album tracks, and they still carry Open Mic Productions today.
That is the whole point. A new credit on new releases tells you nothing about old ones. Catalogue can sit with a former rights holder forever while an artist builds a fresh discography beside it. Makhadzi Entertainment owns everything from 26 May 2023 onward. It does not, on any evidence available, own anything from before.
The fourteen days when both companies were issuing her records#
There was no clean handover date. The first release credited to Makhadzi Entertainment is “Niazwifha”, 26 May 2023. The last Makhadzi lead release credited to Open Mic Productions is “Noto Baiza”, 9 June 2023. For fourteen days, two different companies were putting out Makhadzi records as the credited owner at the same time. Whatever ended, it did not end on a Tuesday with a handshake.
One barcode pool, two companies#
Every release carries a UPC barcode. The first six digits are a GS1 company prefix, issued to one subscriber, who allocates the remaining serials themselves. If two companies’ releases share a prefix, one subscriber registered both, and that detail tells you most about how this actually worked in practice.
Open Mic’s Makhadzi releases all sit on the prefix 757572. So do Makhadzi Entertainment’s first twelve releases, from 26 May to 22 September 2023, including her own first album under her own company. And the serials do not sit in two tidy blocks. They interleave, in date order, across the two rival companies:
“Niazwifha”, 26 May, Makhadzi Entertainment, 757572947546. “KHARILITSHE”, 2 June, Open Mic, 757572947874. “Noto Baiza”, 9 June, Open Mic, 757572948055. “Dear EX”, 16 June, Makhadzi Entertainment, 757572948161.
One ascending sequence, alternating owners. Both sides were drawing barcodes from a shared pool that belongs to neither of them. The same prefix turns up on releases credited to Wanitwa Mos Entertainment, Ejarden Entertainment, Nkosazana Daughter and Kamo Mphela’s company, an intermediary’s block, and for four months after the split both the artist and the label she had left were standing in the same queue. From 5 April 2024 her releases move to a different prefix, 766214, the same migration Kamo Mphela’s catalogue makes at roughly the same time. Both prefixes belong to intermediaries serving several South African labels at once.
We are not naming either intermediary. GS1’s public prefix-holder lookups were all unusable on 30 September 2026: one returned HTTP 403, one returned a not-found page, one returned nothing at all. The pattern is suggestive. Suggestive is not sourced, and an unsourced claim about which company moved another company’s rights is precisely the claim this publication does not make.
What the dispute was actually about#
Makhadzi’s public complaint was money, not ownership. In her own words: “I have never received any cent of my sales.” She said she had signed “with open mic only for three years”, that “In this three years I dropped 4 albums”, and that “Some of my album reached platinum some gold”. She also questioned how a renewal had happened without her: “how possible is that for you to renew my contract without coming to me”.
A letter attributed to Open Mic, quoted in reporting from the same week, refers to “renewing or extending the contract period for an additional period of three (3) years with effect from the 09th of March 2023”.
Open Mic’s managing director, Nkateko Maluleke, initially declined to engage: “We will not be commenting on this issue as we are contractually bound by confidentiality provisions in the agreement entered into with our artist Makhadzi.”
That did not hold. Eight days later, on 11 May 2023, Open Mic went public with figures: it said it had paid Makhadzi R7.9 million directly, plus R300,000 toward a deposit on a house in her name. Its lawyers demanded she retract the “not a single cent” claim, calling it false and defamatory, and gave her until noon the next day to comply or face legal action.
Neither side’s numbers have been audited. No adjudication or settlement was located. This is not an allegation left hanging: it is two named parties on record with contradictory figures, and this piece will not pick a side neither a court nor an auditor has picked. What matters here is narrower. Open Mic’s rebuttal answers the payment claim only. It says nothing about who owns the masters, and the confidentiality position on the underlying contract was never withdrawn.
But notice what the dispute is not. An artist saying she was not paid for her sales is an accounting complaint. An artist saying the recordings are hers is an ownership claim. She made the first. She has not made the second, and the credit lines say she could not.
Where the registries disagree#
Three releases do not line up, and it would be dishonest to leave them out. On “My Love” (10 July 2020) and “Muya Wanga” (7 August 2020), Apple returns a credit in Makhadzi’s own name while Deezer gives the label as Bellionare. On “Vho Mazwale” (14 July 2023), Apple again returns her own name while Deezer gives Soultec Records. Deezer’s field records the label a record came out on; Apple’s records who owns the recording, so this is not a flat contradiction, but it is unreconciled and it is on the file.
What this means for artists#
Four things, plainly.
Leaving is not recovering. Ending a contract stops new recordings going into someone else’s catalogue. It does nothing to the recordings already there. If you want the old ones back, that is a separate negotiation with its own price, and it does not happen because you announced a departure.
Bookings, masters and publishing are three different things. Makhadzi took control of bookings in May 2023. Her masters from 2020 to 2022 stayed. Her publishing is not documented anywhere we could reach. Three separate rights, three separate conversations, and settling one settles none of the others.
“I was not paid” and “I do not own it” are different fights. The first is an audit and an accounting. The second is a title dispute. Running them together, which happens constantly in coverage of these splits, gets artists bad advice. Know which one you are in.
Read your own barcodes. The interleaved 757572 serials are a fact about this artist’s business that neither party announced and neither would likely have volunteered. Your UPC prefix tells you who actually registered your release. If it is not a prefix you hold, someone else is the subscriber of record on your catalogue, and you should know who.
What could not be established#
The terms of any agreement between Makhadzi and Open Mic Productions, or with Rita Dee Entertainment before it: no contract is public, and Open Mic’s position on the underlying agreement remains that it is confidential.
Any consideration for the masters specifically. Open Mic’s R7.9 million and R300,000 figures address the royalty dispute, not a valuation of the recordings. No advance, royalty rate, equity stake or settlement figure for the masters themselves appears in any source reviewed. Nothing on that was disclosed, and we are not going to estimate it.
The holders of GS1 prefixes 757572 and 766214, and therefore the distributor in any period.
Publishing, entirely. No collecting society repertory search resolved.
The corporate particulars of Makhadzi Entertainment and Rita Dee Entertainment. South Africa’s companies register was unreachable on one endpoint and account-walled on the other when checked on 30 September 2026, so registration numbers, directors and shareholders are unknown. Both companies are held in our directory as drafts flagged for research for that reason.
And whether any reversion or buyback of the Open Mic masters has quietly happened since. Nothing suggests one, nothing rules one out. If it has, the credit lines have not been updated to say so.
