Lyta’s masters have changed hands at least five times in eight years, and the artist himself has publicly disclaimed two of the labels his own catalogue names as owner. The Nigerian singer, born Opeyemi Babatunde Rahim, broke out in 2019 with “Monalisa” after a messy, unresolved exit from Olamide’s YBNL Nation. He went on to a publicly celebrated signing with Naira Marley’s Marlian Music in 2020, then moved through two more label names few people outside his own credits have ever written about, before landing, as of this year, back on his own name alone.
This publication read the phonogram (℗) line on Lyta’s primary discography in Apple Music’s own catalogue metadata, corroborated against Deezer’s artist and album API. The six-period chronology those two sources independently agree on does not match the version of his career that gets repeated in passing references to a “YBNL act” or a “Marlian Music signee.”
What the credit line says, and when it changed#
Lyta’s first two releases, “Time” (featuring Olamide, 14 February 2018) and “Selfmade” (19 September 2018), both carry “℗ 2018 YBNL NATION.” Olamide announced Lyta as a YBNL act on 15 February 2018, one day after “Time” dropped.
By mid-2019, Lyta had left. His breakout single “Monalisa” (12 July 2019) and the follow-up “Worry” (6 December 2019) both carry “℗ 2019 Doro Musik Gang” instead, a name that gets almost no coverage anywhere in the trade press this desk could find, despite owning the phonogram rights to the song that made him famous.
A single one-off release, “Birthday Wish” (1 May 2020), credits Lyta himself as owner, distributed by a company called Dvpper. Then, starting with “Hold Me Down (Omo Gidi)” on 14 August 2020, the credit becomes “℗ 2020 Marlian Music.” That one holds for 15 months, through “Everybody” (20 November 2020) and “High Vibration,” featuring Naira Marley himself (26 November 2021), before giving way, after one more one-off (“Outside,” crediting Lyta again, 27 January 2022), to a new pairing never previously reported: “℗ 2022 Rafat Music / Dvpper Music,” which runs from “Flex” (13 May 2022) through the “Stranger” single and EP (10 February 2023).
From “Butterfly (Sped Up)” on 6 November 2023, the credit changes again, to “Lyta / Azuri” and variants of it (“Azuri,” “Azuri Musics”), running through “Jami” and “My Queen” in early 2025. Nothing in the public record explains either the move from Marlian to Rafat or the move from Rafat to Azuri. No label change announcement, no interview, no social post marking either transition turned up in this desk’s research.
The most recent shift is also the cleanest. “Trubul,” released 30 April 2026, carries “℗ 2026 Lyta” alone, no label, no distributor named. “Take Your Time” (16 October 2026) repeats it. Deezer’s own label field for “Trubul” independently reads “Lyta,” matching Apple exactly. For the first time since his 2018 debut run, Lyta’s catalogue names no company at all as his phonogram owner.
Two denials, pointed in opposite directions#
The YBNL period and the Marlian period both ended in a public denial from Lyta, but the two denials read very differently once you line them up against the dates.
On the YBNL side, there was never a celebratory announcement to begin with, at least not from Lyta. Olamide introduced him as a label act in February 2018. By June 2019, with the exit already public and messy, both men were on record saying there had been no formal contract. Lyta told NigerianEye on 3 June 2019: “I don’t have any deal with YBNL or Olamide… I don’t have any written contract with him.” Olamide, in a separate interview reported by National Daily eleven days later, said Lyta “has no contract signed,” adding that Fireboy DML is the only YBNL act with “a valid and legal contract.” Both statements followed, rather than preceded, two releases that had already carried “YBNL NATION” as the credited phonogram owner. Worth noting precisely: some of this coverage frames it as “no WRITTEN contract” specifically, which leaves open whether some other kind of understanding existed; this piece is not flattening that distinction away.
The Marlian Music sequence runs in the opposite order, and is harder to explain away. On 11 August 2020, Naira Marley posted “Welcome to MarlianMusic @official_lyta” on Instagram. Lyta responded publicly the same day, thanking “my President @nairamarley for giving me this amazing opportunity” and writing that he was “so excited to be joining my new family Marlian music,” per BellaNaija’s report at the time. That was not a quiet or disputed arrangement; both men announced it, in public, on the same day. Apple’s own catalogue then named Marlian Music as phonogram owner for the next 15 months.
Then, on 5 December 2023, over two years after the last Marlian-credited release and more than a year into the unreported Rafat Music period, Lyta told the Ginger Yourself podcast, as reported by TheWill News: “I am not signed with Marlian Records. Naira Marley is just showing me love.” In the same interview he said he wanted to patch things up with YBNL: “I want to be back with YBNL. What I did back then wasn’t intentional.” No source this desk could find reconciles the mutual, celebratory 2020 announcement with the 2023 denial that a signing ever happened.
Who are Doro Musik Gang, Rafat Music and Azuri?#
Unresolved, for all three. UK Companies House searches for “Doro Musik Gang,” “Rafat Music” and “Azuri Music,” run by this desk on 10 November 2026, return no matching companies. Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission has no public search API, so a Nigerian register check could not be run from this server; a manual CAC lookup is the outstanding step for all three names. This record does not assert that any of them is a registered company, an unregistered trading name, or simply Lyta’s own personal imprint under a new name each time. Several releases in both the Rafat and Azuri periods carry a doubled credit, pairing the label name directly with “Lyta,” and the current 2026 credit drops the label name altogether and reads “Lyta” alone, which is at least consistent with all three having been his own vehicles rather than outside labels. It is also consistent with several other explanations this desk could not rule out. The honest answer is that nobody outside the credit line itself appears to have ever named these three companies in public, and this desk could not establish who controls them.
A fourth name, “Dvpper,” appears repeatedly across the catalogue as distributor, never as phonogram owner, spelled “Dvpper,” “Dvpper Music” and “Dvpper Digital” depending on the release. This publication’s own company directory separately carries both that family of names and a similarly spelled “Dapper Music”/”Dapper Group.” This piece does not assert any connection between the two spellings; it is flagged here only because a reader searching this site for either name should know both exist as separate, unverified entries.
What this means for artists#
Three things from Lyta’s catalogue are worth taking further than one artist’s career.
First, a public announcement and a credit line can both be true and still leave a gap a reader has to notice for themselves. Naira Marley and Lyta both, genuinely, publicly celebrated a signing in August 2020. Apple’s own metadata confirms Marlian Music held the phonogram position for the next 15 months. Three years later, the same artist calls that relationship something other than a signing. Neither account is being presented here as a lie; artists’ own descriptions of their business relationships change over time, sometimes because the relationship itself changed, sometimes because the artist is recasting it after the fact. The catalogue credit is the one thing in this story that did not move on anyone’s say-so; it is simply the fact that existed while it existed.
Second, label names can vanish from the public conversation entirely while still owning a hit record. “Doro Musik Gang” owns the ℗ credit on “Monalisa,” arguably still Lyta’s best-known song, and this desk found close to no independent coverage of the name anywhere. An artist’s biggest song can be sitting inside a company nobody outside the credit line has ever profiled, named, or asked a single public question about.
Third, when a credit line and an artist’s own name start to blur together, as “Lyta / Azuri” and “Rafat Music / Dvpper Music” did for roughly three years before collapsing back into “Lyta” alone in 2026, it may say more about an artist consolidating control of his own masters than about any outside party gaining or losing them. This desk cannot confirm that reading from the public record, but it is worth an artist’s own notice: a credit line that keeps pairing your name with a new company each time is a pattern worth asking your own team to explain, before a reporter or a fan has to piece it together from a catalogue API years later.
This desk could not establish what, if anything, was paid in any of the arrangements named above, or who controls Doro Musik Gang, Rafat Music or Azuri. No consideration, advance, royalty rate or equity stake appears in any source. Afrobeats Wire will update this record if Lyta, Olamide, Naira Marley, YBNL Nation or Marlian Music make a statement addressing any of it.
