Llona’s Master Recordings Carry a KVLT Ent. Credit for Two Years, Then It Disappears. Apple’s Own Catalogue Data Shows When.

Llona is routinely filed, where he is filed at all, as an independent artist or as a KVLT signing, with no agreement on which. His own recorded catalogue, read directly in Apple’s own metadata, says something more specific and more interesting: he owns his masters outright, names himself as rightsholder on every release, and has granted an exclusive global licence to two companies jointly since August 2023, KVLT Ent. and Encore Recordings. On his most recent album, released this August, the credit narrows to Encore Recordings alone. Neither change was announced by anyone.

What the copyright line actually says

Llona, born Michael Ajuma Attah and raised between Kaduna and Abuja by way of Kogi State, has thirteen releases in Apple’s catalogue as a lead or sole artist, checked directly via the iTunes Search and Lookup API for his artist profile. The earliest, “Nobody” (9 April 2022), carries a bare credit: “℗ 2022 Llona.” No label, no licensee, no distributor named. It is a self-release in the plainest sense the metadata allows.

That changes with “HBP” on 18 August 2023. The credit reads “℗ 2023 Llona, under exclusive global license to KVLT Ent./Encore Recordings.” The same wording, unaltered, covers “How I Live” (16 January 2024), the “Homeless” album (25 July 2024) and “Dead Flowers” (25 July 2025), a run of four releases and roughly two years. On “On The Road,” the album released 7 August 2026, the formula shortens: “℗ 2026 Llona, under exclusive global license to Encore Recordings.” KVLT Ent. is gone. Llona released nothing else as a solo artist in the twelve and a half months between “Dead Flowers” and “On The Road,” so the change can be dated only to that window, not to a single day.

Two further credits, both on guest features rather than his own catalogue, corroborate who speaks for his recordings day to day rather than naming a party to this licence. “Gone Rogue,” a Monaky collaboration released 24 October 2025, credits Llona as appearing “courtesy of Encore Recordings.” “Lonely Road,” a T.I Blaze collaboration from 10 October 2025, carries a different label’s credit entirely and makes no mention of either KVLT or Encore, because the masters on that one belong to the other artist’s side of the pairing. Only Llona’s own catalogue, the first group of six releases, is the subject of this record.

What a licence is, and what it isn’t

The distinction matters because it is the one music reporting gets wrong most often. Nothing in Apple’s catalogue, and nothing in any other source checked for this record, states that KVLT Ent. or Encore Recordings owns, co-owns or holds any security interest in Llona’s masters. The copyright symbol, the one that actually denotes phonographic ownership, sits with his own name on every release, including the two with no licensee named at all. What the post-2023 credits add is a licence: permission to exploit the recordings commercially, exclusively, worldwide, for a term and on terms that no source discloses. An artist can own a master and license it exclusively to a company for years without that company ever becoming the owner, in exactly the way this desk has documented for Asake’s Giran Republic and for Uncle Waffles’ KO-SIGN PTY LTD, both artist-held entities distributed by companies that do not own the recordings. Llona’s case is a cleaner version of the same structure, because the artist’s own name, not a company he controls, carries the credit directly.

Who KVLT Ent. and Encore Recordings are

Encore Recordings is the independent Los Angeles label Joie Manda launched in November 2021, a company this desk has already verified in detail against Variety’s launch report, Billboard Pro’s same-day corroboration, and Manda’s own description of Encore as “entirely self-owned” and operating under a strategic partnership with The Orchard and Sony Music that falls short of equity ownership. None of that record mentioned Llona; his catalogue is the first documented instance this desk has found of Encore appearing as a named licensee on a West African artist’s own masters, rather than as a distributor for a South African artist’s own loan-out company, which is the shape of the earlier Uncle Waffles record.

KVLT Ent. is harder to pin down, and the difficulty is itself a finding. “KVLT Ent.” appears nowhere but the catalogue credit line. The name used everywhere else, in the company’s own social accounts and in the one detailed profile of its founder, is KVLT WRLD, a Lagos management and events company run by Jemedafe Caleb Ukoli, known publicly as Partyboy, built out of a high-school day-party brand called Let’s Relate before expanding into artist management around 2019 or 2020. In his own account, given to a profile site built on his first-person telling, Ukoli says of Llona: “When Jemedafe signed Llona, he didn’t just ink a deal, he invested in building a studio, handled distribution, and organised a nationwide tour.” The same profile has him describing how he began managing Victony in January 2020, a relationship Victony has since left. KVLT WRLD’s own social account separately lists Llona among its current roster. Whether “KVLT Ent.” is a distinct registered company from KVLT WRLD, a trading name for it, or simply a shorthand the credit line happens to use, could not be established. Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission has no public lookup available to this desk, so neither name could be checked against an actual company register.

Llona’s own account of how he arrived at KVLT, given in a separate interview, starts somewhere else entirely: a 2019 deal with Johnny Blizz Records that fell apart almost immediately. “In 2019 I got signed to Johnny Blizz Records. I signed a four-year deal and three months after I signed, everything crashed,” he said, attributing the collapse to the label rushing singles out to inflate the project’s budget before anyone fully understood the arrangement. Of the label he wanted next, he said only: “At that moment, I knew KVLT was where I wanted to be. A year later, it happened.” That is a personal timeline, not a contract date, and this record does not treat it as fixing when the KVLT Ent./Encore Recordings licence actually began. No catalogue credit from the Johnny Blizz period appears anywhere in Apple’s metadata for Llona, so that earlier deal cannot be independently dated against his recorded output either.

What this means for artists

Llona’s catalogue is a useful case precisely because so little of the usual reporting machinery exists around it. There was no press release when KVLT Ent. and Encore Recordings appeared as licensees in 2023, and there was no press release, no interview, no social post from any of the three parties when KVLT Ent. disappeared from the same credit line three years later. If a reader relied on Wikipedia, which currently lists Llona as independent, or on a separate bio page that names a label called Astra Records, or on his own interview, which names neither KVLT Ent. nor Encore by their credit-line names, the actual structure of his recording rights would stay invisible. Only the copyright line states it, and the copyright line changed without anyone saying so.

The practical lesson is the same one this desk keeps finding in different catalogues across the continent: an artist’s own name on the phonographic credit is the single most reliable signal of who controls the underlying asset, far more reliable than a label’s social media bio, a trade profile built on a founder’s own account, or an artist’s retelling of his own career in an interview. Llona has kept that signal clean through every version of this arrangement. Whoever sits beside his name as licensee, and for how long, has turned out to be the part of the deal that can change without a word said about it.

Limits of this record. Every catalogue credit was read directly from Apple’s own metadata via the iTunes Search and Lookup API for Llona’s artist profile (ID 1618235780, confirmed as the Nigerian singer-songwriter by MusicBrainz disambiguation), covering releases from April 2022 through August 2026. The KVLT Ent./Encore Recordings formula runs unchanged across four releases and roughly two years before narrowing on the most recent album; no release exists in the gap, so the narrowing is dated to a window of roughly twelve and a half months, not a specific day. No announcement, press release, interview or social statement addressing either the 2023 licence or its 2026 narrowing was located from Llona, KVLT WRLD, KVLT Ent. specifically, or Encore Recordings. Whether KVLT Ent. is a distinct legal entity from KVLT WRLD could not be established; Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission has no public lookup available to this desk. Encore Recordings’ own website returned no response when checked directly for this record, the same outcome previously recorded against it on this site. No amount, royalty rate, advance or specific term length was disclosed by any party for either phase of the arrangement. Llona’s account of his earlier Johnny Blizz Records deal and his wish to join KVLT comes from his own on-record interview and is reported here as his statement, not independently verified against a Johnny Blizz catalogue credit, none of which appears in Apple’s metadata for him.