A Nigerian Federal High Court injunction obtained by Chocolate City Group in October 2013 ordered Brymo to stop recording, releasing or performing for anyone else while the label’s breach-of-contract suit against him went to trial. The order lasted five months. On 3 March 2014, a different judge lifted it, freeing Brymo to work while the underlying case was still pending. No ruling on that underlying case, on whether his contract actually ran to 2016 as the label maintained, has surfaced in any document this desk could obtain.
What the injunction actually restrained#
Chocolate City signed Brymo, born Olawale Ashimi and now known as Olawale Olofọrọ, in 2010. His debut album for the label, #TheSonOfaKapenta, carries a 2012 phonogram credit to Chocolate City Music, the clearest evidence this desk found that the label held rights to that specific release. By October 2013, the relationship had broken down. Chocolate City went to court and won an order, read by this desk in a contemporaneous court report, restraining Brymo from “recording, releasing, distributing any composition, song, musical works or carrying out any activity as a recording or performing artist through or for the benefit of any person or organisation other than Chocolate City,” pending determination of a substantive suit. The label’s stated position at the time was that Brymo’s contract remained valid until 2016. Brymo denied the injunction’s validity on social media within days, calling it “another ploy to disrupt my release as usual,” while continuing to promote a new project, Merchants, Dealers & Slaves.
An injunction of that breadth is not a minor procedural step. It is, in effect, an attempt to freeze an artist’s entire output, not just a specific recording or a specific label relationship, until a court decides who is right. That is the part of this story that is easy to verify: the order existed, it named Brymo specifically, and it covered any music activity for any party other than Chocolate City.
Five months, then a different answer#
The injunction did not last through the full life of the underlying suit. On 3 March 2014, Justice Buba I.N, sitting at the Federal High Court in Ikoyi, Lagos, lifted it. This desk read two separate contemporaneous court reports of the ruling, and both describe the same reasoning: the court held that Chocolate City, as plaintiff, could still be compensated later in damages if it ultimately won the case, so there was no good reason to keep Brymo, the defendant, from working as a singer in the meantime. The judge set a further hearing for 19 and 20 March 2014 on the substantive matter.
That is where the documented trail runs out. Nothing this desk fetched reports what happened at that hearing, or at any hearing after it. No final judgment on whether the 2010 contract bound Brymo until 2016, which was the entire point of the suit, appears in any source obtained for this record. A suit number is quoted in some secondary coverage of the case, but this desk could not independently verify it against a document it actually fetched and read, so it is not repeated here as settled fact. Two other pages that reportedly carry more detail on the case, including the suit number, returned either an expired certificate or a bot-detection block on repeated attempts and were not used as sources.
What the music itself says#
Where the court record stops, the catalogue keeps going, and Apple’s own phonogram credits for each Brymo release tell a consistent story on their own terms. #TheSonOfaKapenta, the 2012 album that predates the dispute, is credited “(P) 2012 Chocolate City Music.” Down, a single pulled from Merchants, Dealers & Slaves and released on 1 October 2013, while the injunction was already in force, is credited “(P) 2013 Brymo,” not Chocolate City. Every release checked after that carries the same pattern: Klĭtôrĭs in 2016, Oṣó in 2018, both credited to Brymo; 9: Èsan in 2021 and Theta in 2022, both credited to Olawale Olofọrọ, the name he has used professionally in recent years.
That pattern is worth being precise about, because it is easy to overstate. A phonogram credit on a streaming platform records who a distributor or rights holder told Apple to list as the owner of that specific recording. It is metadata, not a verdict. It does not, by itself, establish who a court would say owned the rights, or settle whether Chocolate City had any surviving claim over Brymo’s later output. What it does establish, directly and release by release, is that every Brymo recording issued after the 2012 album has carried his own name, not the label’s, as far back as the metadata goes and as recently as this desk could check it.
What stays open#
Three things are unresolved on the record this desk was able to assemble, and each matters for a different reason.
First, there is no final ruling on the central legal question: whether Brymo’s contract with Chocolate City ran to 2016, as the label said when it sought the injunction. An interlocutory order lifting a restraint is not a finding on the merits, and the court that lifted it said so in its own reasoning.
Second, Brymo has no company record of his own in this publication’s directory, and no clearly confirmed registered label for the period in dispute. A credit reading “The Bail Music Company (TML)” appears on a 2019 live album, but it surfaces only there, on one release, which is not enough to treat it as his settled corporate vehicle for the earlier catalogue. Brymo is therefore named throughout as an individual artist, not as a company with its own ownership structure, because the sourcing does not support doing otherwise.
Third, Chocolate City’s own ownership is itself unsettled on this publication’s existing reporting, independent of the Brymo dispute entirely. A separate, previously published record on this desk notes that Warner’s convertible loan arrangement with the label, worth $1,832,500 and convertible into a 60 per cent stake, has never been confirmed as converted or not. Nothing in the Brymo case bears on that question, and nothing in that question bears on the Brymo case. They simply both involve the same label, a decade apart, and neither is fully resolved.
What this means for artists#
For any artist signed to a Nigerian label on a multi-year contract, the practical lesson in this record is not about Brymo’s catalogue specifically. It is about how fast a dispute over contract length can turn into a total work stoppage. Chocolate City did not ask the court to block one album or one release; it asked, and briefly won, an order covering any recording or performing activity for any other party at all. That is the broadest kind of restraint a label can seek, and for five months in 2013 and early 2014, it was in force against a working musician.
The second lesson is about what actually ends up protecting an artist’s position when a dispute like this happens: not the injunction, and not the eventual court ruling on it, both of which left the real question of contract length unanswered, but the pattern of who gets named as rights holder on each new release going forward. Brymo’s catalogue shows his own name attached to every release from the month the injunction was still active onward. Artists in a similar position, whose label relationship has broken down but whose contract’s actual end date is disputed, are living through exactly this kind of gap: an injunction or a legal threat that can stop output cold in the short term, against a phonogram credit line that, release by release, is the clearest real-time record of who a distributor currently recognises as the rights holder.
The third lesson is about what this record cannot tell artists, which is just as important as what it can. It cannot tell them how a Nigerian court would eventually rule on a disputed multi-year contract, because no such ruling turned up in the sources available. It cannot tell them whether Chocolate City retained any claim on Brymo’s output after 2014, because no settlement, judgment or further court filing was found. What it can tell them is that an injunction of this kind, however broadly worded, is not necessarily the end of the story, and that watching the credit line on each subsequent release is one of the few concrete ways to track who a dispute has actually left in control of an artist’s work, while the legal question behind it may never be publicly resolved at all.
Full deal record, including sources checked and what could not be verified: Chocolate City’s October 2013 Injunction Barred Brymo From Recording for Anyone Else.
