Black Sherif’s Management Said He Kept ‘Absolute Ownership’ of His Masters When He Signed With EMPIRE in 2022. Every Phonogram Credit Since Names Empire Too.

Black Sherif’s masters carry two different label credits depending on which platform is checked, and neither one is the name most reports use for the deal that put them there.

In late February 2022, word spread across Ghanaian entertainment media that the Konongo-born rapper had signed a distribution agreement with EMPIRE, the US independent distributor, and that the deal came at the cost of his ownership. Road Boys Association (RBA), his management, moved to shut the story down. In a statement carried on 9 March 2022, RBA said Black Sherif remained under its management, that contract documents circulating on social media were not authentic, and that its priorities included “global protection of the artiste’s intellectual property and absolute ownership of the artiste’s masters.” EMPIRE, for its part, told a Ghanaian broadcaster only that Black Sherif “has not left his management,” without addressing ownership.

Neither statement disclosed what the EMPIRE agreement actually says. No contract has been made public in the more than four years since. What can be checked, independently of either side’s framing, is what the releases themselves say.

What the copyright lines actually show

“Kwaku the Traveller,” the single that made Black Sherif briefly the biggest new name in West African drill, was released on 31 March 2022, three weeks after RBA’s statement. Its phonogram credit on Apple Music reads “℗ 2022 Blacko Management / EMPIRE,” not Blacko Management alone. The same construction, EMPIRE named jointly rather than as a distributor line sitting apart from an ownership credit, appears on the debut album The Villain I Never Was (October 2022) and on the second album, Iron Boy (April 2025), where it reads “℗ 2025 Blacko Management / EMPIRE.” MusicBrainz’s independent registry entry for The Villain I Never Was corroborates this, listing EMPIRE and Blacko Management as joint labels on the release.

A joint phonogram credit is not, on its own, evidence of joint legal ownership. Record labels routinely appear on the ℗ line as a matter of house style, credit convention, or contractual requirement, without that meaning a co-ownership stake in the copyright. But it is also not the credit an outside observer would expect from a pure distribution deal, where the convention (visible, for comparison, on Kizz Daniel’s post-2020 EMPIRE-distributed catalogue, credited simply “FlyBoy INC / EMPIRE” in a structure both sides describe as distribution-only) still names the artist’s own imprint first and does not typically use language suggesting shared rights. RBA’s own description of the arrangement, that it retains “absolute ownership,” sits at odds with a credit that puts EMPIRE’s name directly alongside the artist’s label on every release checked, across more than three years.

A second name nobody has explained

There is a further wrinkle. MusicBrainz’s registry lists two of Black Sherif’s 2025 releases, the single “Lord I’m Amazed” and one catalogue edition of Iron Boy, under the label name “RBA,” not “Blacko Management.” Wikipedia’s own infobox for the artist lists his labels as “Road Boys Association and EMPIRE.” Apple Music, checked directly on the same catalogue, uses “Blacko Management” instead.

It is possible these are simply two names for the same operation: a management company (RBA) that also functions, informally or formally, as a recording label (Blacko Management) for its one core client. Nigerian and Ghanaian artist-owned imprints often work exactly this way, a single small operation wearing a management hat and a label hat depending on the document. It is equally possible they are legally distinct entities that happen to both work with Black Sherif. No source located by this desk, not RBA’s public statements, not EMPIRE’s, not any registry filing, states which is correct. That gap is not filed here as resolved in either direction.

The lawsuit that didn’t answer the ownership question either

The EMPIRE signing had a second consequence: it triggered a legal fight with a prior manager, Shadrach Owusu Agyei, who said Black Sherif had engaged EMPIRE while still under a business management contract Agyei held with him, dated August 2021. Agyei sought an injunction to stop Black Sherif performing and sued for a 20 percent share of his earnings, more than GH₵1.1 million in alleged investment, and $24,000 in accommodation costs.

The case dragged through Ghana’s courts for nearly four years. On 16 January 2026, the High Court’s Commercial Division in Accra, before Justice Afia Adu-Amankwa, ruled largely against Agyei. The court found that Black Sherif’s decision to sign with EMPIRE while under Agyei’s management contract amounted to a “technical breach,” but that Agyei had proven no substantial loss from it, awarding nominal damages of GH₵50,000 against Black Sherif rather than the GH₵1.1 million sought, dismissing the earnings-share claim and the accommodation claim for lack of evidence, and ordering Agyei to pay GH₵15,000 in costs.

After the ruling, Agyei spoke publicly for the first time about how the deal came together, saying Black Sherif returned from a trip to Nigeria with an EMPIRE contract he did not fully understand, that the deal promised $30,000 against what Agyei described as a 15-year term, and that only $15,000 was ever paid, with the rest earmarked for production. These figures come from one side of a dispute he had just lost the bulk of, and neither EMPIRE, RBA nor Black Sherif has confirmed or denied them. They are reported here as a claim, not a fact, and no amount has been added to this record’s amount field because none is confirmed.

What the ruling does establish is narrower than the ownership question this piece opened with: that a management relationship existed, that engaging EMPIRE without the prior manager’s sign-off was a breach of that relationship, and that the breach caused no damages a court found provable. It says nothing about who owns Black Sherif’s masters.

What this means for artists

Two lessons sit underneath the metadata here. The first is that “distribution deal” and “the artist owns everything” are not the same claim, and a management statement asserting the second does not settle whether the underlying paperwork actually says the first. A phonogram credit naming a distributor jointly with an artist’s own label, rather than the more common “exclusive license to” or a bare distributor tag, is worth an artist’s lawyer reading closely before signing, because credit conventions on a release are one of the few public traces of what a private contract actually assigns.

The second is about naming discipline inside an artist’s own camp. Whether Road Boys Association and Blacko Management are one operation or two, the public record does not say, and that ambiguity is itself a cost: it makes an artist’s catalogue harder for a distributor, a sync licensor, or a future buyer to diligence cleanly, and it is entirely within an artist’s own control to fix by using one consistent, clearly defined rights-holding entity on every release.