Wizkid’s first two studio albums carry the same phonogram credit today, and it names a company that has not been part of his public story for a decade. Read on 12 November 2026 in the United States Apple Music storefront, both Superstar and Ayo show the line “℗ 2022 Empire Mates Entertainment Ltd.” A rights registry document for the 2014 release of Ayo names two labels on that record, not one: Empire Mates Entertainment and Starboy Entertainment Ltd. The edition now selling names only the first. No party has explained the difference, and the second company has been dissolved since June 2026.
The short version#
- What the credit says now: “℗ 2022 Empire Mates Entertainment Ltd.” on both albums, identical, confirmed on the live Apple Music album pages and through Apple’s lookup API on 12 November 2026. Deezer carries Ayo with the label field “Empire Mates Entertainment Ltd.” and the product code 765855510950.
- What the registry says about 2014: the MusicBrainz release document for Ayo, barcode 888174872544, dated 17 September 2014, names two labels: Empire Mates Entertainment and Starboy Entertainment Ltd.
- When the current editions appeared: the web archive first captured the live Apple page for Ayo on 9 June 2022 and for Superstar on 12 June 2022. The 12 June capture already contains the Empire Mates credit.
- The company that dropped off the credit: Starboy Entertainment Limited, United Kingdom company 10075091, was dissolved on 16 June 2026 and remains dissolved, with no restoration on its filing history as at 12 November 2026.
- What changed hands: not established. No announcement, no price, no agreement.
Two registries, two answers#
Start with the thing that is simply checkable. Apple’s catalogue entry for Superstar sits at collection identifier 1627794779, 17 tracks, with an Apple-listed release date of 12 June 2011. Ayo sits at 1627800102, 19 tracks, with an Apple-listed release date of 17 September 2017. Both return the same copyright string. That string is not a sidebar artefact or a guess: it comes back from Apple’s own lookup endpoint as the album-level field, and it is present in the raw HTML of both live pages.
Deezer agrees on the supplier. Its record for Ayo, album 319781177, carries the label “Empire Mates Entertainment Ltd.” and the same 17 September 2017 date. Two unrelated stores, one name.
The divergence appears when you look at what the 2014 release of the same album stated. The MusicBrainz document for Ayo describes an official worldwide release dated 17 September 2014 with barcode 888174872544, and its label block carries two entries: Empire Mates Entertainment and Starboy Entertainment Ltd. The registry entry for Superstar, dated 1 July 2011 with barcode 700261889917, names Empire Mates Entertainment only, and a second Superstar entry dated 12 June 2012 does the same.
So the registry record of the 2014 Ayo has two labels on it and the record you can stream today has one. The product codes are different too: 888174872544 against 765855510950. Different codes mean a different released product, which is what you would expect from a fresh delivery to the stores rather than an edit to an existing entry.
The June 2022 window#
The web archive dates the current entries with reasonable precision. Its index for the exact Apple URL of Ayo at collection 1627800102 shows a first successful capture on 9 June 2022. The equivalent index for Superstar at 1627794779 shows a first successful capture on 12 June 2022, and the archived HTML from that day already contains “℗ 2022 Empire Mates Entertainment Ltd.” The same string is still there in the capture taken on 17 August 2022, and it is still there on the live page now.
That matters because it brackets the event. These are not entries that have quietly drifted. The current Apple identifiers did not exist in the archive before June 2022, and from their first archived day they carried the Empire Mates name and a 2022 phonogram year on recordings first released in 2011 and 2014.
A phonogram year is the year the sound recording was first published. When it reads 2022 on an album from 2011, one of a small number of things has happened: a new master was published that year, or the supplier simply set the field to the date of its own delivery. Both are routine. Neither is an ownership claim. What is not routine is that the field was reset at a moment when Wizkid’s current releases were going out under an entirely different company’s name.
Three names, one catalogue#
Wizkid’s recorded output, read across 160 album-level Apple entries, sorts into layers. From 2017 to 2022, his major releases read “Starboy Entertainment Ltd., under exclusive license to RCA Records”, with the Nigerian company in the owner position and the Sony Music label as licensee. From late 2023 that wording inverts: S2, Morayo and the singles around them read “RCA Records, under exclusive license from Starboy Entertainment Ltd.” In January 2026, REAL, Vol. 1 with Asake drops RCA entirely and reads “Starboy Entertainment Ltd. / GIRAN Republic / EMPIRE”. And underneath all of it, the first two albums read Empire Mates Entertainment.
Then the company at the centre of that trail stopped existing. Companies House records Starboy Entertainment Limited, company 10075091, as dissolved on 16 June 2026. Checked again on 12 November 2026, the status is unchanged and the filing history shows no restoration. The Gazette, the official public record where a restoration or a disclaimer of a dissolved company’s property would have to be published, returns 28 notices for the phrase “Starboy Entertainment”. The most recent is dated 16 June 2026, the dissolution itself. Nothing has been gazetted about the company in the five months since.
Across the whole Apple catalogue, no release dated after 16 June 2026 credits Starboy Entertainment Limited. The three entries dated 2 July 2026 are guest appearances credited to other suppliers. That is an absence, not a transfer, and it is recorded here as an absence.
Owns, licenses, distributes: why the words matter#
Four different legal relationships get flattened into the phrase “his label” in most coverage, and the distinction is the whole substance here.
A phonogram credit identifies who claims to be the first publisher of the recording. “Under exclusive license to” means the first-named party holds the copyright and the second has the right to exploit it for a term. “Under exclusive license from” reverses which party is in the owner position. A label field in a store is softer still: it is whatever the distributor typed. None of these is a deed of assignment, and none of them is a court finding. They are evidence of what a rights supplier instructed a store to display, on a date that can be documented. That is genuinely useful, and it is also the limit of what it proves.
On that basis: this piece does not establish who owns Superstar or Ayo. It establishes that the stated owner on both is now a single company, that a registry document for the 2014 release of one of them named two, and that the one that disappeared from the credit is dissolved.
What this means for artists#
The practical lesson is about where your catalogue actually lives, and it applies to anyone signing in Lagos, Accra, Nairobi or Johannesburg.
First, the credit line is the only ownership statement about your records that the public can see, and you are usually not the one who writes it. Whoever delivers the files to the stores sets that field. If an old label still supplies your early catalogue, its name stays on your work indefinitely, regardless of what you have said publicly or what you believe your contract says.
Second, a company can hold your masters and then simply cease to exist. Dissolution is often administrative, triggered by unfiled accounts rather than by any dispute. Under general United Kingdom law, property held by a dissolved company passes to the Crown as unclaimed property, subject to restoration. Whether that happened to anything here is not established and should not be assumed. But the risk is real and it is cheap to check: a company number and two minutes on a public register will tell you whether the entity named on your records is still alive.
Third, ask for the delivery, not just the deal. Which legal entity is named on the phonogram line, in which territories, from which date, and who can change it. Those are answerable questions at signing and nearly unanswerable a decade later.
What we could not establish#
No party has announced anything about these two albums. Nobody speaking for Wizkid, for Empire Mates Entertainment, for Starboy Entertainment Limited or for RCA Records and Sony Music has published a statement about the June 2022 re-delivery or about who owns the recordings. No consideration is known and this desk publishes no figure, because it is not established that any transaction occurred at all.
Empire Mates Entertainment Ltd. could not be resolved to a company register. A Companies House search returned no company of that or any similar name, and Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission publishes no searchable public API, so the legal person behind the name on the credit is unknown here.
The dates conflict and we are not resolving them. Apple and Deezer both give Ayo a release date of 17 September 2017. The registry gives 17 September 2014, three years earlier to the day. The two stores agree with each other and disagree with the registry.
And the registry itself is community-maintained. Its 2014 document may record labels printed on an edition that genuinely differed from the current one, or it may be incomplete. It is cited as a record of what that release stated, not as proof of title. The finding is the divergence, and it is reported as a divergence.
