Create Music Group announced on 10 April 2025 that it had acquired !K7 Music, the Berlin company behind the Strut label. Both trade reports covering the announcement called it an acquisition. !K7’s own chief executive, in the same announcement, called it a partnership. Eighteen months later, the practical consequence showed up on a record sleeve: Strut, the imprint !K7 brought into its group in 2008, released Orchestra Baobab’s first new studio album in nine years, and the credit line names neither BMG nor World Circuit, the companies that have owned the Senegalese band’s entire back catalogue since 2018.
What changed hands in April 2025#
!K7 Music was built by one man. Horst Weidenmüller started it in Berlin in the mid-1980s as a music-video production company, launched its !K7 Records label in 1996, and in 2008 bought a struggling UK label called Strut, known for Afrobeat and Italo-disco reissues, and folded it into the group alongside a third imprint, 7K!. Weidenmüller ran it for four decades. He died in February 2025, aged 60.
Two months later, Create Music Group, the Los Angeles distribution and publishing company founded by Jonathan Strauss in 2015, announced it had acquired !K7. Music Business Worldwide and HitsDailyDouble, the two trade outlets that covered the announcement, both ran it under acquisition headlines. Inside the announcement itself, the language was less settled. Create’s chief financial officer, William Smith, said the company was “trusted” with Weidenmüller’s “legacy.” !K7’s chief executive, Tom Nieuweboer, called the deal a “partnership,” not a sale, and said it let !K7 “scale our vision while staying true to our core values.” Weidenmüller himself, in a statement prepared before he died, used the same word: a “partnership” that would let what he built “continue to thrive and evolve for years to come.”
Neither company has disclosed a price, a share percentage, or a closing date separate from the announcement itself. Create is privately held: a June 2024 funding round brought in $165 million from Flexpoint Ford at a reported $1 billion valuation, and by March 2026 the company had raised roughly $450 million more in equity and debt at a reported $2.2 billion valuation, with its founders keeping majority control throughout, according to public reporting on the company. None of that reporting discloses what it paid for !K7. A search of US securities filings for “Create Music Group” returns nothing, which is expected: the company is not a public filer, so nothing about this deal is required to appear in a regulatory document anywhere.
That gap between “acquisition” in the headlines and “partnership” in the executives’ own words is not a contradiction this piece can resolve. It is simply what both companies, on the record, chose to say about the same transaction on the same day.
Where the money trail meets a 44-year-old band#
Orchestra Baobab formed in Dakar in 1970 and recorded most of its classic catalogue for World Circuit, the London label that also released Buena Vista Social Club. World Circuit itself was sold in 2018, and this desk has previously reported in full on that transaction: BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited took control of World Circuit Limited, UK company number 02072285, on 5 October 2018, ten days before either company said anything publicly about it, and World Circuit remains a wholly owned BMG subsidiary today, with Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA named as the ultimate parent in its own audited accounts. Every Orchestra Baobab studio album in Apple Music’s catalogue, checked directly against the platform’s own metadata, carries a “World Circuit Limited, a BMG Company” phonogram credit from the band’s earliest material through 2017’s Tribute To Ndiouga Dieng. That 2017 record was also, until this October, the most recent one they had made.
On 23 October 2026, Strut released Made In Senegal, the band’s first new studio album since then, recorded in Dakar and built around the band’s 50th anniversary. Strut’s own product page for the release states plainly that World Circuit was the label for the band’s prior album, full stop; it draws no line from that company to this one. Apple Music’s phonogram credit for Made In Senegal reads “Strut Records, a division of K7 Music GmbH / Madoky Music,” naming Strut’s German parent and a second company, Madoky Music, together. BMG does not appear. World Circuit does not appear.
Madoky, also styled Ker Madoky, describes itself as a bridge between West African music and the rest of the world, and its own site lists Orchestra Baobab among its artists. One structured-data field on that site names a founder, Abibou Mbaye; this desk could not corroborate that against a second source, and Senegal, like Nigeria, has no public company register this desk could query to check whether Madoky is incorporated, and if so, where or under what name. How the phonogram rights in Made In Senegal actually split between !K7’s Strut and Madoky is not stated by either company in anything this desk read. Nor does any document address whether World Circuit or BMG held, or waived, any option over the band’s new recordings; it is simply absent from the record, not denied.
One other detail is worth flagging precisely because it is stale, not current: WOMEX, the trade directory musicians and promoters use to book world-music acts, still lists World Circuit Records as Orchestra Baobab’s label as of this piece’s reporting. That listing predates the band’s new album and has not caught up with either Strut’s own product page or Apple’s own catalogue credit. It is a reminder that a trade directory is a snapshot, not a filing, and the two documents that are actually current about this release, the label’s own product page and the distributor’s own metadata, agree with each other and not with WOMEX.
What this means for artists#
None of this changes who wrote Orchestra Baobab’s songs or who is owed royalties on them; composer credits are a separate question from label ownership, and this record does not address them. What it does show is how little an artist’s new signing has to do with who owns their old one. BMG, through World Circuit, holds Orchestra Baobab’s entire recorded history up to 2017 outright, confirmed by a UK company register and the company’s own audited accounts, two of the strongest documents available anywhere in the music business. The band’s return to the studio nine years later went through an entirely different corporate chain, one that itself changed hands in the same window: a Berlin label group bought, or “partnered with,” depending on whose statement you read, by a fast-growing Los Angeles distributor less than two years ago.
For any artist weighing a label offer, the lesson is not about Orchestra Baobab specifically. It is that the company signing you today may not be the company your masters sit with in five years, and the paperwork that tells you who actually controls your new label, not its press release, not a trade directory, not even its own chief executive’s choice of the word “partnership” over “acquisition,” is usually a company register in a country you have never had reason to check. For Orchestra Baobab, checking that register meant Companies House in London, for the catalogue they already have. For the album they just released, this desk could not check a register at all: Germany’s does not cover !K7 in a form this desk could search, and Senegal’s does not appear to exist in public form for Madoky. That is not a loophole anyone built on purpose. It is simply how thin the paper trail still is for African artists’ new recordings, even when the catalogue standing right behind them is some of the best-documented rights history in the business.