Général Philo Says Bomayé Musik’s Catalogue Is Still His, No Matter Who Leaves. Apple Music’s Own Credit Line Puts Naza’s Exit Three Years Before He Describes It.

In an interview published on 20 April 2023, Bomayé Musik co-founder Général Philo was asked about the exits of three artists from the Kinshasa-rooted, Paris-based label: Gaz Mawete, Naza and Keblack. His answer grouped the three together and treated their departures as a routine, recent event. “Les contrats ont une durée de vie,” he said. “Nous ne restons pas sur ça toute la vie.” Contracts have a lifespan, he said in effect. We do not stay on that forever. In the same conversation he also made a separate, broader claim: that whatever happens to an artist’s relationship with the label, the recordings they made while signed stay his. “Mon catalogue de la musique est composé de leurs œuvres,” he said. My music catalogue is made up of their works.

Those are two different claims, and Afrobeats Wire checked them against a different kind of record: the copyright credit line that Apple Music itself attaches to every track and album, pulled directly from Apple’s public lookup API for the catalogues of all four artists named in or around that interview, including Youssoupha, who had already left the label a year earlier and said so publicly. The ownership claim holds up. The timeline claim does not.

What Philo said, and when

Youssoupha confirmed his own departure from Bomayé Musik in an RFI interview on 13 April 2022, citing creative differences with Philo and naming a new structure, WeThe99, based in Abidjan. That departure is well documented in French-language African music press, including Revolution.cd and Adiac-Congo. A year later, Philo’s April 2023 remarks folded Gaz Mawete, Naza and Keblack into the same kind of ending, without giving individual dates, as though all three had wound down their Bomayé relationships around the same recent window.

What the credit lines actually show

Every track sold or streamed through Apple Music carries a phonogram copyright line, the “(P)” credit that names whoever controls the sound recording at the time of release. It is not a legal filing and it is not proof of who owns a master today. But distributors update it when a release moves to a new label or a new distribution deal, and a change in that line is a real-world signal that something changed in how a release reached the market. Read across each artist’s full discography, the pattern is specific and dated in a way Philo’s interview was not.

Youssoupha. His solo catalogue carries a Bomayé Musik credit, sometimes rendered as “licenced by Mukongo Business,” continuously from 2006 through his April 2022 album NEPTUNE TERMINUS (ORIGINES), the release that coincided with his announced split. No new Youssoupha solo release appears under either label for the next 30 months. His next own-name record, Zequin Theory, arrives on 26 November 2024 credited to “99 Revolution, under exclusive distribution to AllPoints, a division of Believe.” That timeline is broadly consistent with the public account of his exit.

Naza. His catalogue is credited to Mukongo Business through “On t’a dit” on 19 October 2018. From “Vodka” on 8 August 2019 onward, continuously through to the most recent releases checked, every credit reads “Capricarolesque Industry, under exclusive distribution to AllPoints, a division of Believe.” That transition sits in mid-2019, roughly three and a half years before Philo’s interview grouped Naza’s exit with Gaz Mawete’s and Keblack’s as though it were recent, and more than a year before Youssoupha’s own, later-announced departure.

Keblack. His catalogue runs on Mukongo Business through “Beau parleur” on 29 November 2019, then a hybrid “Mukongo Business / Allpoints” credit on “De quoi tu parles” in March 2020, before moving to “Dayeden Musik” from December 2020 and then to “Motema Records, under exclusive distribution to AllPoints, a division of Believe” from September 2023. His break with the Mukongo Business credit line starts nearly three and a half years before the April 2023 interview, in two distinct steps rather than one clean exit.

Gaz Mawete. His catalogue is the one case that roughly lines up with Philo’s framing. It carries a Mukongo Business credit through the album Puzzle, and a Mukongo Business credit still appears on a feature track as late as December 2023, eight months after the interview. His own-name releases move to a new label, BNB Records, starting in January 2024, after the interview Philo gave.

The finding

Philo’s April 2023 answer presents Gaz Mawete, Naza and Keblack as a single, recent cohort whose contracts simply ran out together. The dated credit-line evidence does not support that compression. Naza’s and Keblack’s transitions away from the Mukongo Business/Bomayé credit began in 2019 and 2019 to 2020, years before the interview and, in Naza’s case, well before Youssoupha’s own public exit. Only Gaz Mawete’s actual label change happened on a timeline close to when Philo was speaking, and even that happened after the interview, not before it. A public narrative that groups three departures into one recent moment is, on this evidence, compressing a staggered unwinding that in fact played out over roughly four years.

What is not contradicted is the separate, narrower claim that Philo still owns the back catalogue. Every pre-departure release by all four artists keeps its original Bomayé-linked credit (Mukongo Business or Bomayé Musik) in Apple’s metadata, with no sign of a retroactive relabeling once an artist left. That is consistent with Philo’s retained-ownership claim, though it is also simply what you would expect to see whether or not a formal reversion or buyout ever took place.

What this is not

A phonogram credit is not a contract, and Afrobeats Wire has not seen the underlying recording agreements between Bomayé Musik, Mukongo Business and any of the four artists. No company registry, French or Congolese, was checked for this record; Pappers.fr, Societe.com and OpenCorporates were either inaccessible or returned no usable filing during this desk’s research. The territory of any rights at issue is not stated in the available sourcing, and no deal value is claimed or implied anywhere in this record, because none has been disclosed. What exists here is a specific, checkable mismatch between a public statement and dated distributor metadata, not a resolved ownership dispute.

What this means for artists

For artists signed to independent African labels distributing through majors-owned networks like AllPoints/Believe, the practical lesson is that a label head’s public account of when and how an exit happened can be checked, cheaply and specifically, against the credit metadata every streaming service already publishes. That metadata will not tell an artist who owns their masters, but it will tell them, with dates, when a distributor started treating their new output as belonging to someone else. Artists negotiating an exit, or disputing one, have a free, public, dated record available to them before they ever need a lawyer: their own catalogue, read track by track.