960 Music Group Bought Close to 40% of Hypertek Digital and Aristokrat Music in 2013. It’s Now Suing to Undo a Sale It Says It Never Approved.

In 2013, a Nigerian entertainment company called 960 Music Group bought close to 40 per cent of two record labels in one move: Hypertek Digital, the imprint 2Baba built after leaving Kennis Music, and Aristokrat Music, the Port Harcourt label that had signed an unknown singer named Burna Boy two years earlier. The reported price was 20 million to each label, with no currency stated in the only contemporaneous account of the purchase. Thirteen years later, that stake is the reason a Nigerian federal court is being asked to unwind a multi-million dollar sale of Burna Boy’s earliest recordings.

What actually changed hands in 2013

The purchase surfaced in a single year-end trade round-up published in December 2013, which named 960 Music Group as the buyer of “almost 40 per cent” of both Hypertek Digital and Aristokrat Music, paying “20 million each to the labels.” No currency symbol appears anywhere in that account, and nothing checked for this record fixes what currency was meant. Treat it as unstated, not as naira and not as dollars.

What the money bought was equity: a minority shareholding in each label as a business. It was not, on the evidence available, a purchase of song rights or master recordings. Those stayed with each label. That distinction matters more than usual here, because one half of that 2013 purchase is now the subject of a court fight over exactly that separate class of asset.

No Nigerian corporate registry record confirming the stake’s size or structure could be obtained for this record. Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission has no public search interface, and a request to OpenCorporates for either company returned an access error rather than a filing. Some secondary sources circulating online attribute the 2013 purchase to a different buyer, “Rio Africa” or “Rio Partners”, and describe 960 Music Group itself as Dubai-based. Those claims trace only to Wikipedia and pages that repeat it, not to a document this desk could fetch and read, so they are not repeated here as fact.

Hypertek Digital’s decade without 960 Music Group in the headlines

Of the two labels, Hypertek Digital’s story since 2013 is the quieter one. In September 2020, the label signed a worldwide publishing deal with Sony/ATV covering 2Baba’s catalogue alongside work by Sir Victor Uwaifo, Dammy Krane and Rocksteady. 2Baba called it a deal that brought “top-level expertise, structure and experience to unlock opportunities on a global scale.” A publishing administration deal of that kind does not touch ownership; Sony/ATV collects and pitches on the catalogue’s behalf, for a fee, while the underlying rights sit wherever they already sat.

The other change at Hypertek Digital was managerial rather than financial. In March 2024, 2Baba and his manager of twenty years, Efe Omorogbe of Now Muzik, ended their partnership by mutual agreement. Omorogbe said working with 2Baba had been “beyond work,” and that his team would be “supporting from the sidelines.” 2Baba said he owed much of his career to Efe and the Now Muzik team. Since then, 2Baba has been managed in-house by his own label, meaning Hypertek Digital now carries both recording and management functions for its founding artist. Nothing in that announcement mentions 960 Music Group, and no source checked here shows whether its 2013 equity stake in Hypertek Digital is still in place, was bought out, or was diluted. That is a genuine gap, not a settled fact either way.

Aristokrat’s stake resurfaces in a Port Harcourt courtroom

Aristokrat Music’s history with 960 Music Group did not stay quiet. In documents filed at the Federal High Court in Port Harcourt, 960 Music Group states that it holds a 40 per cent equity stake in Aristokrat, the same figure reported for both labels back in 2013, and says that stake was cut out of a transaction it should have had a say in.

The transaction in question is a 2024 sale: Aristokrat’s founder, Piriye Isokrari, is alleged to have sold the intellectual property and master recordings from Burna Boy’s earliest catalogue, including the albums on which he built his career, to Spaceship Music, the label owned by Burna Boy and his mother and manager, Bose Ogulu. 960 Music Group’s court filings say the sale was finalised without its knowledge, consent or board approval, and one of its representatives put the argument bluntly: “You cannot sell 100 per cent of an asset when you only have the authority to manage the company.” The civil suit, 960 Music Ltd v. Aristokrat Records Nigeria Limited & Ors, seeks to void the assignment and recover the proceeds.

A parallel criminal track opened alongside it: police investigators filed a fraud-related charge against Isokrari over the same transaction, accusing him of diverting proceeds outside the company’s official accounts. That charge was struck out by a different Federal High Court division in June 2026, but for a reason that says nothing about who owns what. The judge threw it out because the prosecution failed to properly serve the charge and failed to show up for the hearing, a lapse in process rather than a verdict on the underlying facts. The civil case in Port Harcourt, where the ownership question actually lives, was still active as of the most recent reporting checked for this record.

What this means for artists

The throughline for any Nigerian artist reading this is not really about 2Baba or Burna Boy individually. It is about what a minority equity stake in your label can mean for the masters you think you have already put behind you.

An artist who signs to an independent label rarely sees, and is rarely shown, who owns pieces of that label’s holding company. A label can raise outside capital, sell equity to an investor, or restructure its shareholding entirely without the artist’s name appearing anywhere in the paperwork, because the artist’s contract is with the label, not with the label’s shareholders. That is precisely the gap 960 Music Group says it fell into: a shareholder with a real stake, on the outside of a decision about the label’s most valuable asset.

It cuts both ways for the artist too. Burna Boy’s 2024 deal was widely read as a homecoming, a chance to own his own early masters outright after building his career elsewhere. If a Nigerian court eventually sides with 960 Music Group, the practical result could be that those masters, or the proceeds from selling them, end up contested property in a dispute between two companies that predates his global career, over a stake he was not a party to creating. An artist’s leverage to buy back their own history is only as clean as the cap table of the label that sold it to them, and that cap table is not something most artists are shown, let alone asked to approve.

The practical lesson is unglamorous but real: an equity stake sold quietly in one year can resurface as a live legal claim over an entirely different asset a decade later. Artists negotiating any transfer of their masters, whether buying them back or licensing them onward, have reason to ask not just who currently runs their label, but who owns pieces of it, and whether every one of those owners has actually signed off.

What is not established

This record does not establish the exact currency or present-day value of the 2013 purchase; it does not establish whether 960 Music Group’s stake in Hypertek Digital, as opposed to Aristokrat, is still intact; and it does not establish who, if anyone, holds the majority of either label beyond that reported 40 per cent. The Port Harcourt civil suit over Aristokrat’s 2024 catalogue sale had not been resolved on the merits as of the most recent reporting reviewed for this record, and any outcome there would sit outside, and after, the 2013 transaction this record documents.