Every recording carries a claim about who owns it, and in African music that claim is often the weakest link in the chain. This week’s coverage shows catalogues whose paperwork contradicts itself, licences that two parties read in opposite directions, and royalty deals that promise a share without showing a figure. The credit line has become the most important document in the business, and too few people read it closely.
Two credit lines, one catalogue#
Start with the 1970s recordings of Zambian band WITCH. Now-Again Records says it licensed the Zamrock catalogue from the band’s last surviving member, yet its own two credit lines give different answers about who holds the masters.
A label cannot easily be both a licensee and an owner. A listener buying the record on one storefront is entitled to know which version of the story to believe.
Ethiopia offers a similar lesson in slower motion. Muzikawi stopped claiming Ethiopia’s masters outright in February 2025, a retreat that matters because it shows the earlier claim had run ahead of the paperwork.
The distribution trail behind that reissue is just as tangled. An Addis Ababa label named Sony’s The Orchard as its digital distributor in 2022, and a Los Angeles record shop as its US distributor in 2026. Delivering a record to a platform is not the same as owning it, and a reissue that changes partners every few years asks listeners to trust a story they cannot check.
Rulings that cut both ways#
Egypt shows what happens when the paper is clear but its meaning is not. Sawt Al-Qahera says a 2020 court ruling gave it Umm Kulthum’s masters, while Mohsen Gaber reads the same ruling as a licence to him.
Nobody in that dispute denies that a licence exists. The fight is over what it settled, and the two companies are carrying it out in writing and on television.
For a catalogue as central as Umm Kulthum’s, a ruling that can be read two ways is not closure. It is an argument deferred into public view.
South Africa shows the same pattern in older paperwork. In January 2016, Sowetan reported that Kalawa Jazmee, the pioneering kwaito label, had been folded into a new holding company, and that Universal Music was reported to own 51% of it.
The striking detail is what the label’s own releases say. A decade of release credits names nobody but Kalawa Jazmee, so a reported stake sits in a newspaper archive while the sleeve tells a simpler story.
Royalties that promise a share without a number#
Collection societies face the problem from the other side. Senegal’s SODAV and Mali’s BUMDA signed a royalty-collection deal in Dakar that renews an older arrangement and discloses no price.
Renewal is not a defect, and reciprocal arrangements between African societies are how royalties cross borders at all. But a deal with no disclosed price gives a songwriter in Senegal or Mali nothing to check against the statement that eventually arrives.
Burkina Faso’s experience is more pointed. Orange Burkina Faso promised artists 10% of Allô Muzik revenue under a convention signed on 5 December 2025.
Yet the copyright society’s own director described the arrangement as a redistribution rather than the direct payment the announcement had described. When the society’s head uses a different word from the company’s announcement, the gap between headline and entitlement becomes visible. An artist who reads ‘10%’ without the word ‘direct’ has been handed a headline, not a contract.
Attribution is the next fight, and it starts with the sleeve#
The question of who owns a sound is about to meet the question of who trained on it. Irving Azoff’s Music Artists Coalition has joined a brief in the New York Times’ US copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft.
Our recent explainer on attribution treats it as a possible bridge between human creativity and AI music. That bridge only holds if the sources it points to agree with themselves.
A system asked to credit new music to old sources will inherit whatever confusion the catalogues carry, only faster and at larger scale.
What this means for artists#
- Ask for the chain of title in writing: who licensed what, from whom, and for which territories. A licence in one file and an ownership claim in another should match.
- Read every ruling and collection deal for its verbs. ‘Licence’, ‘redistribution’ and ‘ownership’ are not interchangeable, and each carries different money.
- Insist on a figure. If a royalty arrangement discloses no price, ask what the share is calculated on and when statements arrive.
- Audit your own credit lines. Sleeve, metadata and distributor records should name the same rights holders, and any change should be documented when it happens.
- Treat AI licensing requests as title questions first. Before agreeing to anything, confirm you hold the rights to grant it.
