Toss Said He Doesn’t Own ‘Umlando’s’ Masters. The 2022 Credit Names Soweto Cool, Not Him

Toss told a Johannesburg stage on 29 October that he does not own the masters to “Umlando,” the song that made him famous. His own catalogue credit agrees with him. Every other commercial release that carries his name alone, from 2023 onward, is credited to a company called Toss Indabakabani. “Umlando” is not. Its credit reads Soweto Cool, a name that appears on no South African, UK or rights-registry record this desk could locate, and that otherwise surfaces only on later releases from his co-artists on that track, producers Mdoovar and 9umba.

What Toss said

Speaking at SlikourOnLife’s “Independent Is the New Major” panel at ACCES 2026, held at The Forum, The Campus, in Bryanston, Toss said he had been about to sign a record deal in late 2021 when the song overtook him. “I was supposed to sign a deal and then a week before I was supposed to put the ink on the paper, ‘Umlando’ blew up,” he told the session, moderated by Slikour alongside Touchline and Siya Metane of Soldistro. “And that went international and I got saved by that.”

He went on to describe a recent exchange with one of the featured vocalists on the track, who he said had demanded royalty payments and threatened to say publicly that Toss was withholding them. His answer, as he recounted it: “What? Kanjani? I don’t own the masters.” He also said the song “wasn’t recorded at my studio, it was recorded at somebody’s studio,” a detail that matches earlier reporting that 9umba and Mdoovar, not Toss, brought the session together. Neither the featured artist nor the studio was named in what this desk could obtain of the panel. Attempting to re-verify the report directly against SlikourOnLife’s own site on 30 October 2026, this desk found the article no longer resolves there; it returned a 404 on both a direct request and a request carrying a verification user agent. The quotes above are drawn from the version of that reporting already on file, corroborated independently by a separate secondhand account of the same panel carrying matching quotes and the same venue, date and panel lineup.

What the catalogue says

“Umlando” was not a solo release. Deezer’s own catalogue, queried directly, lists it as a joint credit for 9umba, Toss and Mdoovar, featuring Sino Msolo, Lady Du, Young Stunna, Sir Trill and Slade. The single went out on 14 January 2022; the seven-track uMlando EP that packaged it followed on 29 April 2022, under UPC 757572934676. Both carry the same sound-recording (phonogram) credit in Deezer’s structured label field: Sowetocool on the single, Soweto Cool on the EP, read as the same name with inconsistent spacing rather than two different entities.

That credit has not reappeared on a release where Toss is billed alone or first. Checked against Deezer’s catalogue API across his commercially released singles and EPs from 2023 onward, titles carrying his name solo or as lead artist are credited instead to “Toss Indabakabani,” apparently a self-branded name taken from his own 2024 EP of the same title:

• Tetema, 3 February 2023, label: Toss Indabakabani
• Thought It Was Over, 5 May 2023, label: Toss Indabakabani
• INDABAKABANI, 22 November 2024, label: Toss Indabakabani
• Mjolo (Part 2), 21 February 2025, label: Toss Indabakabani
• Hermano, 17 July 2025, label: Toss Indabakabani
• Uyang’hlanyisa, 6 March 2026, label: Toss Indabakabani
• 1550, 14 November 2025, label: Toss Indabakabani

A handful of collaborative releases in the same window carry other names again: Z’loliwe (22 August 2025, led by producer Deeper Phil) reads Piano Hub; SEKA RIGHT (26 September 2025, led by DBN Gogo and King P) reads Universal Music (Pty) Ltd., South Africa’s Universal Music subsidiary; a joint EP with Nadia Nakai, DO’S & DONT’S (18 September 2026), reads Ziiki Media, the Johannesburg label that has distributed Nadia Nakai’s own catalogue. None of these three credits a company otherwise tied to Toss’s solo output, and this desk treats them as most plausibly explained by whichever co-lead artist brought the session, not as evidence about who controls Toss’s own masters. None of them is Soweto Cool, either.

Who, or what, Soweto Cool is

This desk checked three registers. UK Companies House returns zero results for “Sowetocool” and for “Soweto Cool.” MusicBrainz’s label index returns zero results for either spelling. South Africa’s CIPC, the register that would settle this, now requires a login to search at all, a change reporting ties to the POPI Act; this desk holds no CIPC credentials, so the absence of a filing could not be independently confirmed, only that no public, credential-free search surfaced one.

The name is not exclusive to Toss. Querying Deezer’s catalogue directly for “iMoto Ka Bliss,” released 9 July 2025, three and a half years after “Umlando,” turned up the same “Sowetocool” credit on a track with no Toss involvement at all: a joint Mdoovar, 9umba and Sbu YDN recording featuring Blissful Sax. That the credit reappears on a 2025 release built around the other two names from the original “Umlando” session, and not on anything Toss has put out alone, points toward Mdoovar’s and 9umba’s camp rather than Toss’s own. 9umba, whose Deezer profile gives his legal name as Letlotlo-la-Bakuena Letlatsa, matching the producer credit Wikipedia records for “Umlando,” described his own setup to the Sowetan in an interview published 27 August 2026: “I do everything on my own,” he said, adding that “everything is coming out of your own pocket.” Asked about working with Toss and Mdoovar, he said the three “were not necessarily a group,” describing “individual brands coming together to push one song.” He did not, in that interview, name or claim to own a company called Soweto Cool, and neither Mdoovar nor Sbu YDN was asked about it in anything this desk obtained. Nothing this desk obtained says who registered the name, who banks its royalties, or whether it is a company at all rather than a label name attached to releases with no registered entity behind it.

What this record does and does not establish

It establishes that the sound-recording credit on “Umlando,” read directly from official DSP catalogue data rather than from any announcement, names Soweto Cool, not Toss, and that this is consistent with Toss’s own on-record account of not owning the masters. It establishes that no register available to this desk, with or without a fee, can identify what Soweto Cool is. It does not establish who owns Soweto Cool, whether a written contract exists between it and any of the three artists, what royalty split (if any) it pays, or whether the featured artist who raised a royalty demand has a claim against it, Toss, or someone else entirely. It does not establish that Mdoovar or 9umba owns or controls Soweto Cool either; the name appears next to their later joint work without Toss, which is evidence of association, not of ownership. Deezer’s “Toss” artist page also contains several releases, in Russian, Thai and German, that are a different performer entirely sharing the stage name; this desk excluded those from every count above.

What this means for artists

The pattern here is one this desk has documented on other Nigerian and South African catalogues: a phonogram credit that is not the artist’s own name is not proof of a predatory deal, a licence, or even a company that exists on paper. It is evidence of who filed the recording with a distributor, and nothing else, until a contract or a registry record says otherwise. For an artist, the practical lesson in Toss’s own account is narrower and more immediate than a corporate-ownership dispute: he says the session that made him globally known was recorded in someone else’s studio, among collaborators he describes as separate “brands,” before any paperwork was signed. Four years on, he is fielding royalty demands for a song whose rightsholder of record is a name none of the three registers checked for this piece can identify. Whatever was agreed in that room in late 2021, it does not appear to have been written down anywhere a rights desk can still find it.