M.I Abaga Said He Left Chocolate City in 2020. The Phonogram Credits Said Chocolate City Still Held a Licence Until 2022.

M.I Abaga told his fans in March 2020 that he was done with Chocolate City. Two years later, the phonogram credit on the biggest album of his comeback said the company he supposedly left was still holding an exclusive licence to his masters.

The registry trail runs through Apple’s own phonogram lines and MusicBrainz’s release data for M.I Abaga (Jude Abaga), and it does not show a clean handover. It shows a label credit that keeps changing hands between two companies for roughly two years after the public split, before settling, by 2025, on no company at all.

What the exit announcement said

On 6 March 2020, M.I Abaga posted a video on Instagram announcing he was leaving Chocolate City, the Nigerian label and talent company (Chocolate City Music) he had fronted since the mid-2000s. “My best wasn’t good enough… but it’s alright,” he said, framing it as an amicable exit. He named his new venture Incredible Music. BellaNaija covered the announcement the same day. Neither that report nor the announcement itself addressed who would own his existing masters or what, if anything, Chocolate City would keep.

What the phonogram credits actually show

Apple’s canonical lookup for M.I Abaga (artist ID 924250671) carries a full phonogram history. Before the split, the credit is consistently Chocolate City: “Talk About It” (2009), “The Chairman” (2014) and “A Study On Self Worth: Yxng Dxnzl” (2018) are all credited to Chocolate City Music or Chocolatecity Music. “Judah the E.P.”, released on 6 March 2020, the same day as the exit video, carries a 2019 Chocolate City Music phonogram line, meaning it was registered before the split was announced.

The first release to carry the new company’s name is “The Live Report EP” on 15 April 2020, credited to Incredible Music, alongside a second name, Cordless, whose relationship to either company this desk could not establish. That would be the clean handover the announcement implied, if it had held.

It did not hold uniformly. “TBDK” (19 March 2021) and “All My Life” featuring Oxlade (21 May 2021), both released more than a year after the Instagram announcement, carry a straight Chocolate City Music phonogram credit with no mention of Incredible Music at all. Then, starting with the single “Daddy” featuring Chillz in March 2022, the credit changes shape again: “Incredible Music under exclusive license to Chocolate City LTD.” The same wording carries through to “The Guy”, the album M.I released in August 2022, including its title track.

That phrase is the whole story. It does not say Chocolate City owns the masters. It says Incredible Music, M.I Abaga’s own company, owns them, and has licensed them to Chocolate City on an exclusive basis, for a period and on terms neither company has disclosed.

MusicBrainz’s own release data for the artist (MBID bfe2ae79-d0fe-463f-87b2-bbc4a3ab0cc2) corroborates the company switch independently of Apple’s metadata: its entry for “Plan B”, dated 9 June 2023, labels the release to “Incredible Music Limited” with no mention of Chocolate City. MusicBrainz’s label registry carries two separate entities under that name: one based in Lagos, disambiguated in the registry itself as “founded by M.I Abaga,” and a second, unrelated-looking entity registered in the United Kingdom. Nothing in the data this desk could access ties the two together, and this piece treats them as unconfirmed cousins at most, not as proven to be the same company.

What the trade coverage missed

None of this nuance made it into contemporaneous coverage. Guardian Nigeria’s release-day report on “The Guy,” published 19 August 2022, calls M.I Abaga “Chocolate City’s finest,” language that reads as if he had never left. Music Business Worldwide, reporting on Chocolate City’s business more broadly, wrote that the label’s “Hip-Hop legend M.I Abaga… released his most recent album The Guy via Chocolate City in August,” with no reference to Incredible Music or to any licence. Both outlets described the relationship exactly the way it looked before 2020, two years into a credit structure that said something more specific: Chocolate City had become a licensee of M.I Abaga’s own company, not his original label.

Where it stands now

By July 2025, the licence language is gone from the catalogue entirely. “Mr. Fantastic,” M.I Abaga’s most recent single at the time of writing, carries a phonogram credit naming only M.I Abaga, no company at all. That is consistent with either an expired licence term or a renegotiated arrangement that has not been credited the same way, and this desk has not found a source that explains which.

What this means for artists

The lesson here has nothing to do with whether M.I Abaga’s exit from Chocolate City was genuine. It plainly was: he started a new company and that company’s name shows up on his masters from 2020 onward. The lesson is about what “leaving a label” actually means on paper. For two years, leaving did not mean Chocolate City lost access to his new work. It meant his new company became the owner of record and Chocolate City became an exclusive licensee instead, a structure that can look, to a casual fan or even a trade reporter working from a press release, exactly like nothing had changed at all. Artists negotiating an exit from a label relationship should treat the phonogram line on their own future releases as the actual record of what was agreed, not the press language either side puts out afterward.

What is not established

This desk could not establish: the terms, duration, or consideration of the Incredible Music to Chocolate City licence; whether the licence has formally ended or simply stopped being credited after 2024; the relationship, if any, between the Lagos-based Incredible Music Limited and the UK-registered company of the same name in MusicBrainz’s label registry; or the identity of “Cordless,” which appears alongside Incredible Music on two releases and could not be confirmed as any specific company. Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission has no public searchable register, so no incorporation filing for Incredible Music could be checked directly. All figures and terms in this piece are described as not disclosed because no party has disclosed them.