A court said no to a specific request. It did not say who owns a master recording, and it did not say who owes whom money. Those two facts, kept apart, are the whole story of where Ami Faku’s dispute with her label owner actually stands.
On 1 July 2026, a High Court dismissed an urgent application brought by the South African singer Ami Faku (Amanda Faku) against Raphael Benza, her former manager, and his company, reported by one outlet as “Benza Consulting CC (trading as The Vth Season).” She had asked the court to stop Benza and the company from telling publishers, distributors and the public that she remained bound by 2018 “artist agreements” covering her album Ezikude and her single Ndisize, works she says have yet to be released partly because of those warnings. The court refused. Benza told TshisaLIVE afterward that “we don’t feel like we won against Ami because we never tried to fight against her,” and said he is still pushing for an amicable settlement.
That ruling is the only court decision anywhere in this dispute. It is worth being precise about what it covers, because it is narrower than the headlines around it suggest, and because a second, older, separate claim between the same two parties remains entirely unresolved.
Two lawsuits, not one#
The first action dates to May 2025. Faku sued Benza and his label, named in that filing simply as “Vth Season,” over what she described as incomplete and poorly compiled royalty reports. She said their agreement entitled her to half of the label’s net income along with full accounting, and that when she asked for records she received figures she could not verify. She asked the court to end her artist, management and publishing agreements with the company, and she claimed ownership of the master recordings to Imali, her 2019 debut album, on the basis that she had personally spent more than R400,000 of her own money producing it. No ruling or further reported development on that specific claim has surfaced since.
The second action, filed roughly thirteen months later in June 2026, is a different and narrower complaint. Faku asked for an urgent interdict, arguing that Benza and his company were actively telling distributors, including by name LVRN, Platoon, Empire and Africori, that she remained bound by the 2018 agreements, and that this was discouraging those companies from working with her and holding up the release of Ezikude and Ndisize. She said the original agreement had expired in September 2023 once its term and option periods ran out. Benza disputed the characterization directly: “I’ve never called any distribution company,” he said, and described his side as trying for three years to get her to sign a no-cost release from the relationship rather than fighting her.
Those are two different legal questions. The first is about money already allegedly owed and who owns an existing master. The second is about whether a company can keep asserting a contractual claim to the public while the underlying dispute is unresolved. The court that ruled on 1 July 2026 ruled only on the second question, and it ruled narrowly: the interdict Faku sought was refused. Nothing in that ruling touches the royalties claim, and nothing in it establishes who owns Imali’s masters.
A costs order pointing the other way#
One detail in the coverage of the July ruling is genuinely odd, and it is corroborated by two independent outlets rather than resting on a single account. TshisaLIVE and Zalebs both report that the costs order from the dismissal was made against Benza, not against Faku, even though her application was the one that failed. Neither piece explains the court’s reasoning, and no judgment text has surfaced publicly to supply it. A third outlet, BuzzLifeNews, reports the dismissal “with costs” without naming either party, which this desk treats as a gap in that account rather than as a conflict with the other two, since silence on a detail is not the same as reporting the opposite of it.
It would be easy to read “dismissed” as a clean loss for Faku and move on. The costs detail is a reminder that courts sometimes weigh conduct separately from outcome, and that a losing application is not automatically a losing position on the facts underneath it. Readers should resist collapsing the narrow procedural result into a verdict on the larger dispute, because the larger dispute, specifically who owes what and who owns what, was never before this court in the first place.
What has and hasn’t shipped#
Checking the actual catalogue adds one more layer, and raises more questions than it answers. As of mid-November 2026, neither Ezikude nor a solo Ami Faku single called Ndisize appears on Apple Music or Deezer. The only “Ndisize” either platform carries is a 2024 feature on a single by the producer Caiiro, crediting Faku as a guest rather than as the lead artist, which does not line up neatly with press descriptions of “her single Ndisize.” That the two disputed works are simply absent from the major platforms is consistent with Faku’s own account that their release has been held up. It is not proof of why they have been held up, and it does not by itself confirm anyone’s account of what caused the delay.
A separate, unrelated-looking fact turned up while checking those two titles, and it is worth setting out carefully because it complicates rather than confirms any one party’s story. A duet called “Fakazela,” pairing Faku with another South African artist, Thando Zide, exists on both platforms with a release date in the first half of June 2026, inside the exact window the urgent application concerns. Deezer’s label field for that release reads “Platoon,” one of the four distributors named in Faku’s own court papers as having allegedly been warned off working with her. Apple’s own copyright credit for the same recording names neither Platoon nor Vth Season, crediting Thando Zide alone. What that single, real, dated release means for the broader claim about distributors being discouraged is not something this desk can resolve from the available evidence, and no attempt is made here to resolve it. It is recorded because a reader checking the same two disputed titles would run into it immediately, and burying it would leave a gap this piece would rather name than hide.
Imali’s own master credit, meanwhile, has not moved. Apple’s South African catalogue still lists the album’s phonogram line as crediting Vth Season, unchanged since its 2019 release. A rights credit is not a court finding, and it says nothing about who is entitled to what under the underlying agreement; it only says who currently appears as the delivering rights holder on that one recording, five months before the royalties lawsuit and well over a year before the interdict.
A label with a prior, amicable version of this story#
This is not the first time Vth Season has faced a rights dispute with one of its signed artists. A separate, previously resolved case involved Tresor, another artist on the label’s roster, who bought back his own masters in 2024 after a dispute over his catalogue, reported at the time as resolved amicably. That earlier case is not evidence of how the Faku dispute will end, and nothing connects the two beyond both artists having been signed to the same label at different points. It is useful only as context for how this particular label has handled at least one prior disagreement of a similar shape.
What this means for artists#
The most practical lesson here is not about who is right. It is about how little the public record settles, even after an actual court ruling, and how important it is to keep separate questions separate. An interdict about what a label can say to distributors is not the same fight as a claim about unpaid royalties or disputed master ownership, even when the same two names are on both. An artist watching this dispute from the outside should notice that Faku’s underlying royalties and masters claim, filed over a year before the interdict, appears to have gone nowhere in the public record since its filing: no ruling, no settlement announcement, no further reported movement. That is not unusual for contract disputes of this kind, which often move slowly and settle privately, but it is a reminder that a single court date making headlines does not mean the larger dispute is anywhere near resolved.
It is also worth artists noting what a phonogram credit can and cannot tell them about their own catalogue. An unchanged “(P) [label name]” line on a six-year-old release says only who currently presents as the delivering rights holder to streaming platforms. It does not, on its own, show whether a contract has expired, whether royalties are current, or whether a dispute over that very credit is already in court. Artists who want to know where they actually stand need the contract and the accounting, not just what shows up next to their own song.
Finally, a dismissed application is not automatically a clean loss. Outlets covering the same ruling can diverge on a detail as basic as who a court held responsible for costs, and two accounts naming the same party is a stronger basis for treating that as established than either alone.
Nothing in any source obtained for this piece discloses a settlement figure, a royalty arrears amount, or a resolution to either the royalties claim or the masters question. Both remain open, on the public record, as of mid-November 2026.
