A company called EGT Corporation is named as the owner of ElGrandeToto’s current recordings. Sony Music Entertainment France SAS appears on 19 of his 43 solo releases and is named as owner on none of them. On three releases from late 2024 it is described as the distributor. From December 2025 onwards the same relationship, with the same owner, is described instead as an exclusive licence.
The Moroccan rapper is one of the biggest rap acts in North Africa and one of very few artists from the Maghreb to appear in the credits of a major label’s French operation at all. What has not been reported is the shape of the arrangement, and the shape is the interesting part, because the documents that exist say the major does not own anything.
This desk pulled Apple’s full catalogue for the artist on 9 October 2026 from the Moroccan storefront. It returned 114 rows, of which 49 are collections where he is the credited artist and 43 are credited to ElGrandeToto alone. Every one of those rows carries a phonogram credit in the copyright field: the ownership assertion the delivering party made to the retailer. Those credits are the primary document here. They are not contracts, and nobody should read them as contracts, but they are dated, they are consistent across six national storefronts, and they are the parties’ own words.
What the credits actually say#
From September 2017 to November 2023 the owner position belongs overwhelmingly to a Casablanca imprint, BNJ City Block, which appears on 20 collections, 19 distinct titles, in three different casings. Four 2018 releases, including the EP Illicit, name Chabaka. Three releases in 2019 and 2020 name the artist’s own stage name. Two one-off credits, Toto and Hades, appear once each in 2018.
The first Sony credit lands on 8 July 2022, on “Comforter”, a single with the Nigerian singer Ayra Starr. It reads: “℗ 2022 CHAPITRE 1, under exclusive licence to Sony Music Entertainment France SAS”. CHAPITRE 1 is a name that had never appeared in his catalogue before and does not appear in it after December 2022. Four releases carry it, the last rendering it as CHAPITRE 1 SPRL.
Then nothing Sony-related for ten months. When the pairing returns on 26 October 2023 with “WELD LAADOUL”, the owner position has gone back to BNJ City Block. Six releases carry “BNJ City Block, under exclusive licence to Sony Music Entertainment France SAS”, including both editions of the album 27.
In October 2024 the owner position changes again, to EGT Corporation, and so does the wording of Sony’s role: “℗ 2024 EGT Corporation, distributed by Sony Music Entertainment France SAS”. Three releases carry it, ending with the 17-track SALGOAT on 29 November 2024. Then the catalogue goes quiet for 385 days. It restarts on 19 December 2025 with “BOOMX3”, same owner, same Sony company, new wording: “under exclusive licence to”.
Distributed by, licensed to, owned by: three different things#
This is where most coverage of African signings goes wrong, so it is worth being slow about it.
If a credit says a company owns a recording, that company holds the copyright in the master. If it says a company distributes it, that company is moving the file into shops and taking a fee, and the rights have not moved at all. If it says the recording is under exclusive licence to a company, the owner still holds the copyright but has handed over the exclusive right to exploit it, for some period and some territory, and in practice the licensee is the one making commercial decisions until the licence runs out. A licence is much closer to a record deal than a distribution agreement is. It is also reversible in a way that an outright assignment is not.
So the change between 29 November 2024 and 19 December 2025 is not cosmetic. The same two companies swapped one of those relationships for the other. No filing, no registry entry, no press release and no statement from either party, located anywhere by this desk, explains it. The change coincides with the longest release gap in his catalogue, which is a fact about dates and nothing more. Anyone who tells you it proves a renegotiation is guessing.
Where the records disagree with each other#
Deezer and MusicBrainz back up some of this and flatly contradict other parts. Deezer’s label field for SALGOAT says BNJ CITY BLOCK, where Apple’s phonogram credit says EGT Corporation. Deezer’s label field for Illicit says ElGrandeToto, where Apple says Chabaka. MusicBrainz also puts BNJ City Block on SALGOAT and on “DIPLOMATICO”. And MusicBrainz puts “Sony Music Entertainment France” in the label field for SALGOAT (Vol. 2), which is the one place in the entire evidence base where a Sony entity sits in a position that could be mistaken for ownership.
These are not the same claim. A label field says who a service thinks released the record. A phonogram credit says who the deliverer asserts owns it. Where they split, the phonogram credit is the stronger document, and the split is itself worth publishing rather than tidying away.
Three companies that do not exist on paper#
Here is the part that should make anyone uncomfortable. None of the three companies named in the owner position across the Sony years resolves to a company register this desk could reach.
The French national business register returns zero results for EGT Corporation, zero for BNJ City Block and zero for Chapitre 1 SPRL, all checked on 9 October 2026. SPRL is a Belgian legal form, and the Belgian register cannot be queried without a browser session. Morocco’s commercial register has no public interface at all. So the jurisdiction, the directors and the beneficial owners of the companies that are asserted to own this catalogue are simply unknown. EGT matches the artist’s initials, and BNJ City Block presents as his own imprint, but no document connects him to the ownership of either. That inference is left as an inference.
The only party here that does resolve is the licensee. Sony Music Entertainment France is SIREN 542055603, Paris. That asymmetry, a fully identified French major on one side and three unresolvable name-strings on the other, is the normal condition of African rights records and it is the reason this publication exists.
What Sony itself publishes#
Sony Music France keeps an artist page for him. Its machine-readable publication date is 10 February 2022, five months before the first Sony credit appears in any metadata, and it was last modified on 29 September 2026. Its own summary describes Caméléon as his first album. Caméléon, released 4 March 2021, carries the credit “℗ 2021 BNJ CITY BLOCK” and names no Sony entity whatsoever. A news item of 22 June 2026 announcing SALGOAT (Vol. 2) runs to about 81 words and contains no label, no rights, no territory and no term. Neither page names a Sony frontline label as his. The frontline label names that do turn up in the page source are the site’s own footer menu, not a statement about this artist, and reading any of them as a signing would be an error.
What this means for artists#
Three practical things come out of this.
First, the structure on display is the good one. An artist-side company sits in the owner position and the major is named behind it as licensee or distributor. If you are negotiating with a major and your name, or your company’s name, does not appear in the ℗ line on the finished release, you have probably signed something closer to an assignment. Ask to see the credit string before delivery, not after. It is a one-line sanity check on what you actually agreed.
Second, the words in that line are the deal. “Distributed by” and “under exclusive licence to” are not interchangeable and should not be drafted as if they were. If your paperwork says distribution and your released credit says exclusive licence, those two documents disagree about who controls your catalogue, and the credit is the one the world sees.
Third, and least comfortable: a trading name in a ℗ line is not a company. If the vehicle that holds your masters cannot be found in any register, then nobody outside the deal, including a future buyer, a future lawyer or you in a dispute, can verify who controls it. Incorporating somewhere searchable is cheap. The alternative is a catalogue whose ownership exists only as a string of text supplied to a shop.
The full chain, every credit string, every storefront check and every register query, is set out in the deal record. The same reading method, applied to an Ivorian artist, produced a near-identical finding about Himra, and applied to an Angolan artist it produced a sixteen-year distribution record for C4 Pedro that no announcement had described. On the four 2018 masters credited to Chabaka, we could not establish whether that is the same company as the Emirates-based Chabaka Music that Universal Music Group acquired in August 2023, and we make no claim that it is.
