Aristokrat Sold Burna Boy’s Early Masters to Spaceship Music in 2024. A 40 Per Cent Shareholder Is Suing to Undo It.

In 2024, Aristokrat Records Nigeria Limited sold the master recordings and underlying intellectual property behind Burna Boy’s earliest catalogue, the albums L.I.F.E and Redemption and the singles “Like to Party” and “Tonight”, to Spaceship Music, the company Burna Boy owns with his mother and manager, Bose Ogulu. No price has been disclosed; Nigerian press describes it only as a multi-million dollar transaction. The sale did not surface publicly until February 2026, when 960 Music Group, which says it holds a 40 per cent stake in Aristokrat, went to a Federal High Court in Port Harcourt to have it voided.

What Aristokrat sold, and what still is not known

Court filings put the transaction in May or June 2024: Aristokrat’s founder, Piriye Isokrari, transferred the intellectual property and master recordings from Burna Boy’s foundational years to Spaceship Music. The catalogue named in those filings covers the two albums that built his early Afro-fusion sound, L.I.F.E (2013) and Redemption (2016), plus the singles “Like to Party” and “Tonight.” No party issued a newsroom statement or press release announcing the sale at the time it happened. Every account of it that this desk could fetch and read is retrospective, published only after 960 Music Group’s court filing became known in February 2026, nearly two years after the transaction is dated.

No price appears in any source checked. Nigerian trade coverage repeats “multi-million dollar” as a description, not a figure, and no party, Aristokrat, Spaceship Music, Burna Boy or Bose Ogulu, has confirmed an amount, a payment structure or a closing date more specific than “mid-2024.” That silence is worth noting on its own terms: a sale reported as a homecoming for one of Africa’s biggest recording artists left no public paper trail for nearly two years.

The claim: a shareholder cut out of its own company’s biggest sale

960 Music Group’s case rests on a specific claim about corporate structure, not about the music itself. It says it holds a 40 per cent equity stake in Aristokrat, the same approximate figure reported in an unrelated 2013 trade account of 960 Music’s original purchase into the label, and that Isokrari sold the catalogue without its knowledge, consent or board approval. Its civil suit, 960 Music Ltd v. Aristokrat Records Nigeria Limited & Ors (FHC/PH/CS/188/2024, Federal High Court, Port Harcourt), asks the court to void the assignment and recover the proceeds. One of its representatives, unnamed in the court filings and in the press accounts of them, put the argument this way: “You cannot sell 100 per cent of an asset when you only have the authority to manage the company, not bypass the owners of 40 per cent of its soul.”

A separate, more serious allegation runs alongside the civil claim: that proceeds from the sale were diverted outside Aristokrat’s official company accounts rather than distributed to its shareholders. That allegation is what produced a parallel criminal track, filed by Nigeria’s Force Criminal Investigation Department against Isokrari for alleged fraudulent conversion and breach of fiduciary duty. No Nigerian corporate registry filing confirming Aristokrat’s shareholding structure or 960 Music Group’s current stake was located for this record; Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission has no public search interface, so 960 Music’s 40 per cent figure rests on its own court filing and on the earlier, separately reported 2013 purchase, not on an independently obtained company register.

A criminal case dismissed on a technicality, a civil case still open

The two legal tracks have not moved in step. On 10 June 2026, a Federal High Court division sitting in Ikoyi, Lagos, struck out the criminal charge, Commissioner of Police v. Aristokrat Records Nigeria Limited & Anor (FHC/L/1087/2025), before Justice Kakaki. The reason given was procedural: the prosecuting counsel was absent, and the police had failed to properly serve the charge despite an earlier order permitting substituted service. That is a dismissal for lack of diligent prosecution, not a ruling that clears anyone of the underlying allegation, and prosecutors retain the option to refile once service is corrected.

The civil suit in Port Harcourt is a separate matter entirely, heard by a different court, and its own most recent scheduling, reported in April 2026, also pointed to a hearing dated 10 June 2026, the same day the Lagos criminal charge was struck out. No source checked for this record reports what actually happened at the Port Harcourt hearing on that date, or since. The civil claim, the one that actually determines who owns the catalogue, remained open and undecided as of the most recent reporting reviewed.

Warner Music Group gets pulled in as a distributor, not a defendant

In 2026, Lagos law firm Creative Legal, acting for 960 Music Group, formally notified Warner Music Group, described in that correspondence as Spaceship Music’s global distributor, demanding that it halt commercial use of the disputed catalogue, covering distribution, marketing, monetisation and licensing. As of the most recent report reviewed for this record, dated 25 April 2026, Warner Music Group had not acknowledged the demand. No source checked names Warner Music Group as a defendant in either the civil or criminal proceedings; the demand letter targets it as the company positioned to act on the catalogue commercially, not as a party accused of wrongdoing in the underlying sale.

One reading says this dispute has nothing to do with Burna Boy himself

Not every account of the dispute frames it the same way. At least one Nigerian music journalist has argued publicly that the fight is strictly between Aristokrat and 960 Music Group over an undisclosed shareholding, and that Burna Boy repurchased his own masters cleanly and in good faith. That framing, reported in secondary coverage rather than fetched directly from its source for this record, separates the artist from the alleged wrongdoing entirely: on this reading, the failure is Aristokrat’s corporate governance, not anything Burna Boy or Spaceship Music did or knew. This desk has not independently verified what Spaceship Music knew about Aristokrat’s internal shareholding at the time of the purchase, and no source checked states that directly either way.

What this means for artists

Buying back your own masters does not insulate you from the seller’s own ownership problems. Burna Boy’s 2024 purchase was framed, before any of this became public, as an artist reclaiming his early work outright. The lesson sitting underneath the litigation is that a clean-looking transaction on the buyer’s side can still be built on a defective one on the seller’s side, and the buyer inherits that exposure regardless of good faith.

Due diligence runs in both directions. An artist buying back masters from a former label has as much reason to ask who owns pieces of that label’s holding company as an artist signing to it in the first place would. A 40 per cent shareholder with no name on the transaction can resurface years later with a claim that reaches the buyer, not just the seller.

Distributors can be drawn into a dispute they are not accused of causing. Warner Music Group is not named as a wrongdoer anywhere in this record, but a demand letter reached it anyway, simply because it is the company with the practical ability to stop money moving on the disputed catalogue. Any company distributing a catalogue with a live, unresolved ownership question attached to it should expect exactly this kind of letter, whether or not it did anything wrong.

What is not established

This record does not establish a price, a precise closing date beyond “May or June 2024,” or a payment structure for the Aristokrat to Spaceship Music transfer. It does not establish 960 Music Group’s exact, current, registry-confirmed shareholding in Aristokrat, only the figure stated in its own court filing and echoed in an earlier, separate 2013 account. It does not establish what occurred at the Port Harcourt civil suit’s 10 June 2026 hearing, whether the criminal charge will be refiled, or whether Warner Music Group has since responded to Creative Legal’s demand. Most importantly, it does not establish who will ultimately be found to own Burna Boy’s earliest recordings: that question sits with the Federal High Court in Port Harcourt, unresolved as of the most recent reporting reviewed for this record.

Correction

Corrected 21 September 2026. This record’s primary citation, a Leadership report dated 9 February 2026, no longer resolves; a standards check on 21 September 2026 found the article returning a server timeout and the Leadership homepage itself unreachable through the same check. No fact in this record has changed. The primary citation has been swapped to Legit.ng’s 10 February 2026 report on the same court filing, already listed among this record’s sources, which names the same parties, the same case and the same claims. The dead Leadership link is kept in the source list for the record, marked accordingly.