EMPIRE and Olamide’s YBNL Nation sign joint-venture distribution and publishing deal

EMPIRE, the San Francisco distributor, label and publisher founded by Ghazi Shami, and YBNL Nation, the Lagos label owned by rapper Olamide Adedeji, announced a joint venture covering distribution and publishing on 18-19 February 2020. The deal covers Olamide’s own catalogue, then-signee Fireboy DML, and any artist YBNL has signed since. No source, including EMPIRE’s and Olamide’s own statements, discloses a purchase price, an advance, a royalty split or an equity percentage in either company. This is a services and distribution partnership of undisclosed structure, not a stake sale, and it predates EMPIRE’s formal Africa division by two years.

What was announced, and by whom

Both parties made the announcement themselves, on their own social accounts, rather than through a press release or a regulatory filing, which is itself a data point about the scale record labels of this kind operate at. Olamide wrote that “YBNL and Empire got a joint venture deal,” naming himself, Fireboy DML and “any other act I sign next” as covered. EMPIRE’s own account responded “Nigeria going global,” saying it was “excited to continue this journey with you and the YBNL family.” Nigerian entertainment outlets BellaNaija and Pulse Nigeria reported the exchange within a day, both dating the deal to the same weekend and both reproducing the same two quotes as the entirety of the public record on terms. Neither outlet, nor any other report traced for this piece, adds a number, a percentage or a contract detail beyond what the two companies posted themselves.

What kind of deal this actually is

“Joint venture” is the term both sides chose, but it is worth being precise about what that word is doing here, because it does not, on its own, tell you who owns what. A joint venture can mean a jointly held company with its own equity capitalisation, or it can mean, as is common in music distribution, a long-term services and revenue-sharing arrangement between two independent companies that never creates a shared legal entity at all. Nothing in the record establishes which of those YBNL and EMPIRE actually signed. What can be established is the practical shape of it: YBNL gained distribution, publishing administration and marketing support from EMPIRE, and EMPIRE gained a Nigerian roster to distribute globally, six years before it opened a dedicated Lagos office.

EMPIRE’s founder has described the company’s general dealmaking philosophy on the record, separately from this transaction. In an interview with a trade publication, Ghazi Shami said the company avoids locking artists into exclusive contracts, and that “when we do rights ownership they are usually joint ownership,” adding that “most of our deals are rooted in the ideology of partnership” and that revenue splits typically favour the artist. That is EMPIRE describing its general practice, not the YBNL deal specifically, and no source ties the two together explicitly. It is included here as context for how EMPIRE talks about its model, not as a substitute for disclosed terms of this particular agreement.

Ownership: what stayed where

Olamide founded YBNL in 2012 and has released his own music through it since, alongside artists including Fireboy DML, Lil Kesh and, previously, Adekunle Gold. No source establishes that EMPIRE acquired any equity interest in YBNL Nation as a company, and no source establishes that EMPIRE acquired ownership of the master recordings of Olamide’s or Fireboy’s catalogues. The deal, on the public record, is a distribution and publishing services relationship. That is a materially different legal position from an acquisition or a majority-stake investment, of the kind this publication has documented elsewhere with Universal Music Group’s move into Mavin Global or Warner Music Group’s outright purchase of Africori. Readers should not infer from “joint venture” that EMPIRE owns a piece of YBNL; the public record simply does not go that far in either direction.

Where this sits in EMPIRE’s Africa build-out

The YBNL deal came years before EMPIRE formalised an African presence. EMPIRE Africa launched in February 2022, headquartered in Lagos, with three executive hires: Ezegozie Eze Jr., previously general manager at Universal Music Nigeria, as vice president of market development; Kareem Mobalaji, a marketing executive who had worked with Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage, Wizkid, Olamide and Fireboy DML, as regional head for West Africa; and Titilope Adesanya, who had worked in product and communications at Africori, as project manager. By the time of that launch, EMPIRE’s releases reportedly filled much of Apple Music’s Nigeria Top Songs chart and the company ranked as Nigeria’s top distributor by chart-tracking service TurnTable Charts. The 2020 YBNL relationship, in other words, functioned as the proof of concept EMPIRE later built a formal division around, expanding since to work with artists including Kizz Daniel and Asake and to distribute records such as Burna Boy’s Twice As Tall.

Why the sourcing stops where it does

EMPIRE is privately held and is not a US securities registrant, so it files nothing with the SEC that would independently confirm or price this transaction. YBNL Nation is a private Nigerian company with no public filing obligation traced for this piece. That leaves the two companies’ own social media statements, as reported contemporaneously by Nigerian trade press, as the entire public evidentiary record for this deal, six years on. That is thinner sourcing than a regulatory filing would provide, and it is stated here plainly rather than dressed up: this piece can confirm that a joint venture was announced, on what date, and covering which artists, and it cannot confirm the equity structure, the financial terms, or the duration of the agreement, because no party has disclosed them anywhere this publication can find.

What this means for artists

The practical lesson for a Nigerian or African artist weighing a similar offer is to separate the language a distributor uses in public from the contract terms that actually govern the relationship. “Joint venture” sounds, to an artist or a smaller label, like a partnership of equals with shared upside. It can be exactly that. It can also be a long-term exclusive distribution and publishing administration agreement with a revenue split and a term length that never surfaces publicly, wrapped in partnership language for the announcement. Both are legitimate business arrangements; they are not the same arrangement, and the difference is entirely about the contract, not the press release. An artist or label operator evaluating a comparable deal should ask directly, before signing, whether “joint venture” means a jointly owned entity, a profit share, or a services and distribution fee, what happens to the masters and publishing rights at the end of the term, and whether the arrangement is exclusive. None of those questions are answered by the public record of the EMPIRE-YBNL deal, and that is precisely the point: a Nigerian label six years into a global partnership, and a global distributor that has since built an entire Africa division partly on the strength of it, have between them still disclosed less about the structure of their relationship than a single US securities filing would require of a public company doing something far smaller.