Chocolate City Licensed CKay’s Masters to Warner Music South Africa in November 2020. The Remix That Actually Went Viral Still Carries No Warner Credit.

Status: unsettled. Checked on 1 November 2026 against Apple’s and Deezer’s own catalogue registries for every live product of “Love Nwantiti” and the surrounding CKay catalogue, and against Billboard’s, NotJustOk’s and Premium Times’ own reporting, each fetched in full.

On 27 November 2020, Warner Music South Africa announced on its own social account that it had signed CKay, a Nigerian artist who had been on Chocolate City Music‘s roster since 2016. Billboard later described the move using the industry term for it: CKay was “upstreamed” from Chocolate City to Warner Music South Africa, with Chocolate City Music licensing his already-recorded “Love Nwantiti” to the major rather than selling it outright. What Apple’s and Deezer’s own catalogue registries show, product by product, is less tidy than that one sentence.

What the registries say, release by release

Every row above was read directly from Apple’s iTunes Lookup API (artist ID 1168769616, and the specific collection IDs for each release) and cross-checked against Deezer’s album API on 1 November 2026. Both returned HTTP 200. Full URLs are in the sources list on this record.

Three ownership structures on one song, fourteen months apart

Billboard’s own account, confirmed by this desk by fetching the article directly rather than relying on a summary, explains the mechanics: CKay’s manager, Ogbolu Favour, is quoted saying that once “Love Nwantiti” “was licensed from Chocolate City Music, the Warner team wanted to release different products of the song, so we had different remixes in different regions. We had the North African remix, East African remix, South African, Spanish and French [versions].” Billboard also states plainly that CKay’s US recording contract sits separately with Atlantic Records, not with Warner Music South Africa.

That explains why the regional remixes Warner commissioned, the North African and French versions dated 21 August 2020 and the German version dated 15 October 2021, carry licence wording naming both companies. It does not explain why the one version of the song that actually became a global hit, the Joeboy and Kuami Eugene remix released on 14 February 2020, nine months before CKay signed to Warner, has never had its Apple or Deezer credit updated to reflect the licence at all. It still reads “Chocolate City Music” alone, with no Warner Music South Africa wording anywhere on that specific product, six years after release and a year after Warner began selling regional spin-offs of it under licence.

Nor does it explain the Acoustic Version, released 8 October 2021, nearly a year into the Warner era and five months after Billboard reported the licensing arrangement publicly: its Apple credit also reads “Chocolate City Music” alone, one week before the German remix of the same song reverted to the Chocolate-City-under-licence-to-Warner wording.

What is NOT established

• Why the viral version was never re-credited. No document read for this record explains why the Joeboy/Kuami Eugene remix, the version with the most streams and the one that charted, kept a Chocolate-City-only credit throughout the period Warner was commissioning and crediting regional remixes of the same song under an exclusive licence.
• The terms of the licence. No consideration, royalty split, term or territory for the Chocolate City to Warner Music South Africa licence is disclosed in any source read. “Not disclosed” is the accurate answer, not an estimate.
• The Felony date discrepancy. Warner’s own 27 November 2020 announcement gave a drop date of 4 December 2020 for the song introduced as CKay’s first release under the new deal. Both Apple’s and Deezer’s registries independently date the same product to 25 November 2020, two days before the announcement that named it as upcoming.
• Whether a tweet attributed to CKay in May 2021 is accurately quoted. Widely circulated reporting attributes to CKay a public statement that he was not signed to Chocolate City. This desk could not independently fetch the page carrying that statement, which returned HTTP 403 to both an automated reader and a direct request from this server on 1 November 2026, and does not rely on it anywhere in this record.
• Corporate structure. Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission has no public search interface, so Chocolate City Music’s and CKay Holdings LLC’s registration details could not be independently checked.
• Any statement from either company on the record. Neither Chocolate City nor Warner Music Group was asked for comment by this desk.