A Nasdaq-listed company called LiveOne, Inc. tells people buying its shares that its catalogue business works with Wizkid. It has told them so in seven separate documents since February 2025. It has never said it once in an annual report or a quarterly report. The claim lives exclusively in registration statements and prospectus supplements, which are the documents a company files when it wants to sell securities.
What actually changed hands is narrow and old. On 28 February 2023 LiveOne acquired a majority interest in two California companies, Splitmind LLC and Drumify LLC. Three and a half years later the filings still do not say what percentage, what it cost, or who sold it. No current report announced the purchase. And the annual report covering the fiscal year in which it happened does not mention either company at all.
This is not a catalogue sale and nothing here says Wizkid’s rights moved. The finding is narrower: a listed company is using a Nigerian artist’s name to describe an asset whose ownership chain it has never fully disclosed.
What the offering documents say, verbatim#
The sentence appears in the business summary of LiveOne’s prospectus supplement of 30 July 2026, and in six earlier offering documents back to a Form S-3 of 13 February 2025:
“Splitmind’s catalog includes 40,000 copyrights and 2 billion streams. Splitmind provides an infrastructure that allows creatives to share sounds while retaining their royalties – paving the path to give producers long-term ownership of their copyrights. Recent collaborations include work with notable artists SZA, Wizkid, Drake, GloRilla, Brent Faiyaz, KYLE, Russ, and Blxst.”
Wizkid is the only African artist on that list. The operative word is “collaborations”, and collaboration is not a rights term. It does not say Splitmind owns a copyright in any Wizkid work. It does not say Splitmind administers one, publishes one, distributes one, or licenses one. Those are four different legal relationships with four different consequences for a songwriter, and none of them appears next to his name in any document read for this piece.
The 40,000-copyright figure is in the same position. It appears in LiveOne’s offering documents and in no Form 10-K or Form 10-Q. The string “40,000” does not occur at all in the annual reports for fiscal 2024 or fiscal 2025. It occurs twice in the fiscal 2026 annual report, and on both occasions it is a Bitcoin price.
Why does it matter which filing a claim appears in?#
An annual report on Form 10-K is audited and carries personal certifications from the chief executive and the chief financial officer under Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The fiscal 2026 report carries those certifications from Robert S. Ellin and interim finance chief Craig Christensen, both dated 29 June 2026. A prospectus supplement is a selling document. Both attract liability, but they are not the same instrument, and a figure a company will print in one and not the other is telling you something.
The subsidiary list stopped naming them#
Every annual report carries an Exhibit 21.1 headed “LIST OF SUBSIDIARIES”. It is the plainest ownership document a listed company produces: names and jurisdictions, nowhere to hide.
LiveOne’s exhibit for fiscal 2024, filed 1 July 2024, ends: “DayOne Music Publishing, Inc. Delaware / Drumify LLC California / Splitmind LLC California”. The exhibit for fiscal 2025, filed 15 July 2025, is identical. The exhibit for fiscal 2026, filed 29 June 2026, ends at “DayOne Music Publishing, Inc. Delaware”. Drumify and Splitmind are gone from the list.
The same annual report then contradicts itself. Its Item 1 business section says the company operates its publishing and artist development business “Through the operations of our DayOne Music Publishing subsidiary”, singular. Its management discussion section, in the same document, says “Through the operations of our DayOne Music Publishing, Drumify and Splitmind subsidiaries”. Its risk factors refer to “the recently completed acquisition of Drumify and Splitmind” and to “our acquisitions of Slacker, PodcastOne, CPS, Drumify and Splitmind”. The acquisition date itself has been deleted: the phrases “February 28, 2023” and “majority interest” do not appear in that annual report at all.
Six weeks later the company put the date back. The quarterly report filed on 14 August 2026 states, plainly, “On February 28, 2023, the Company acquired a majority interest in Splitmind LLC and Drumify LLC”, and again describes “our DayOne Music Publishing, Drumify and Splitmind subsidiaries”. The prospectus supplement of 30 July 2026, one month after the annual report, says the same.
Did LiveOne sell Splitmind?#
Nothing read for this piece says so, and the innocent explanation is the likeliest. Item 601(b)(21) of Regulation S-K lets a registrant leave an entity off Exhibit 21.1 if it is not a “significant subsidiary” by the rule’s size tests. LiveOne’s revenue fell from $114.4 million in fiscal 2025 to $77.1 million in fiscal 2026, so the thresholds moved. The fiscal 2026 annual report contains no deconsolidation, divestiture, disposal or dissolution language of any kind, and the company has twice asserted ownership since filing it. On the balance of the documents, this reads as a materiality judgement, not a sale. It still leaves the record saying a 40,000-copyright catalogue is too small to name in a subsidiary list, and large enough to name to share buyers alongside Wizkid and Drake.
What the rights registries show#
Wizkid’s recorded catalogue does not point at any of this. A catalogue lookup against his artist entry returns 157 releases. Not one of their phonogram notices names Splitmind, Drumify, DayOne Music Publishing or LiveOne. What they name instead is the structure this publication has already documented: “℗ 2017 Starboy Entertainment Ltd., under exclusive license to RCA Records”, and on a 2024 release “℗ 2024 RCA Records, under exclusive license from Starboy Entertainment Ltd.”, with earlier records credited to Empire Mates Entertainment Ltd. The owner is a named company that licenses to a major, and it is not Wizkid’s own vehicle in any simple sense: this desk has established from the UK register that he ceased to control Starboy Entertainment Ltd on 8 August 2018, that his manager has held 75 per cent or more of the shares since, and that Companies House dissolved the company on 16 June 2026.
That check has a hard limit. A phonogram notice identifies the owner of a sound recording, and Splitmind is described as a producer-copyright business, which is the publishing side of the house. Its absence from 157 master-recording credits does not disprove a publishing relationship. It means only that there is no trace of one where a label or distribution relationship would show.
What could not be established#
No contract was read, because none is on file. The percentage LiveOne holds in either company is not disclosed. No consideration is disclosed, in cash, stock or anything else, so this publication records the amount as not disclosed rather than guessing. The sellers are not named, and no minority holder is named.
Several checks were attempted and failed, and are recorded as failures. The California Secretary of State business search returned HTTP 429 twice, so neither LLC’s registration status was confirmed. The ASCAP repertory endpoint returned HTTP 403 and the BMI equivalent returned a bot-challenge page, so no publishing registry could confirm or deny a Splitmind interest in any Wizkid work. The open release registry returns zero label records for Splitmind, Drumify, DayOne Music Publishing or LiveOne, and a second streaming catalogue returned 74 Wizkid albums with empty label fields. The domain splitmind.com resolves to a parked page offering the domain for sale; splitmind.io is an unrelated creative agency with no reference to LiveOne.
One more absence. The fiscal 2026 annual report contains no occurrence of the word “Africa” and none of “Nigeria”. Neither does the prospectus supplement that names Wizkid. The only African content in LiveOne’s disclosure is one artist’s name in a marketing paragraph.
What this means for artists#
Your name is an asset on somebody else’s balance sheet, and you may never be told. A listed company can name an artist in a capital-raising document without any contract with that artist, because “recent collaborations include work with” is a claim about activity, not about rights. Nothing unlawful in it. Nothing in it for the artist either.
Learn which filing you are reading. If a company courting your catalogue cites its own scale, find the number in an audited annual report before you believe it. A figure that appears only in selling documents is itself a fact about the figure.
“Majority interest” is the gap where the detail hides. Fifty-one per cent and ninety-nine per cent are both a majority, and they are very different companies to be a producer inside. The percentage, the minority holders and their consent rights decide whether anybody can outvote you on a sale of your own copyrights.
Promises of ownership need a mechanism. “Paving the path to give producers long-term ownership of their copyrights” is a sentence, not a split sheet. Ask which registered entity is the copyright owner of record, which society the work is registered with, and in whose name the royalties are collected. If the answer is a brand rather than a registered company, there is nothing to enforce.
The credit line beats the selling document every time. Everything verifiable about Wizkid’s rights position came off public credit notices and two free registers. Everything unverifiable came from a prospectus. Any artist can run the first check this afternoon.
The structured record for this transaction, with every source URL and the full list of what could not be established, sits in this publication’s deal database entry.
