Falz’s BahdGuys Has Owned His Masters Since 2009. Four Different Distributors Have Passed Through the Same Catalogue, and Not One Handoff Was Announced

Yewande Coker

September 22, 2026

Deal sheet

Status

Confirmed

Type

Distribution

Parties

BahdGuys Entertainment, Jungle Entertainment, Dvpper Digital

Amount

Not disclosed Not disclosed

Rights covered

Distribution and licensing of recorded masters only. Not ownership, not publishing, not a catalogue sale. Falz's own imprint, recorded under four spellings and referred to here as BahdGuys, is the constant phonogram owner across his own-name catalogue in the Apple iTunes Lookup API (161 rows, artist ID 360389344, US and Nigeria storefronts identical). Within that constant, the distributor or licensee named alongside BahdGuys in the credit line has changed repeatedly since 2014, and no announcement from BahdGuys, Falz, Jungle Entertainment Ventures, Dvpper Digital or any other named party was located for any of the changes.

WHAT IS ESTABLISHED. The earliest dated credit in the catalogue read is the 2009 mixtape "Shakara: The Mixtape," credited "BahdGuys Entertainment Limited" alone. The catalogue then resumes in January 2014 with four consecutive singles ("Cool Parry," "Currency," "High Class," "Jessica") credited "Jungle Entertainment Ventures" alone, the first appearance of any name other than BahdGuys on this catalogue. From 2014 to 2019, Falz's own releases split between the two names with no visible pattern: some are credited "BahdGuys Entertainment Limited" alone (including "Gerrarahere," 2015; "Regards to Your Mumsi," 2016; "Baby Boy" and "27," 2017; "This Is Nigeria," 2018; "Sweet Boy" and "Bon Soir," 2018; "Moral Instruction" and "Alakori," 2019) and others "Jungle Entertainment Ventures" alone (including "Ello Bae," 2015; "Bahd Baddo Baddest," "Bad Gang" and "Chemistry," 2016; "Wehdone Sir," "Jeje," "Something Light" and "La Fête," 2017; the "Falz Experience 2017" soundtrack and "Next," 2018; "Talk," 2019), and at no point in this five-year span does any credit line explain how the two names relate. The first credit to spell out a relationship is "Loving" (20 September 2019), one of whose two Apple collection IDs reads "BahdGuys Records, under license to Jungle Entertainment Ventures." "Bop Daddy" (5 March 2020) and "One Trouser" (21 August 2020) repeat this, one ID each reading "under exclusive License to Jungle Entertainment Ventures," while a second ID for each single simultaneously carries "BahdGuys Entertainment Limited" alone. From "Squander" (4 December 2020) through "Squander (Remix)" (12 April 2021), only BahdGuys is named and Jungle drops out of new-release credits. Jungle then reappears in a different role: "Mercy" (29 July 2021), "Body Language" (24 September 2021) and "Oga" (19 November 2021) each carry two Apple IDs, one reading "BahdGuys Entertainment Limited" alone and the other "Bahdguys Records, Distributed by Dvpper," the first appearance of Dvpper (also styled Dvpper Music, distribution arm of the Dapper Group) anywhere in this catalogue. "Ice Cream" and "B A H D" (2022) name no distributor at all, on Apple or Deezer. "Owa" (22 February 2023) and "Yakubu" (30 March 2023) are the first releases to combine both names in a single credit string, "Bahdguys Entertainment / Dvpper Music," rather than splitting them across separate catalogue IDs. Then, on the same day, "Operation Sweep" and "NDI IKE" (9 August 2023) read "BahdGuys Entertainment Limited/JUNGLE," bringing Jungle back into the credit for the first time since 2020. From "Before The Feast" (7 June 2024) through "Bounce" (7 November 2025), no distributor is named. "Omoge" (20 March 2026) introduces a fourth name, reading "B.A.H.D Guys Entertainment Limited / Azuri" on Apple. "Ole" and the "Break Time" EP (both June 2026) revert to "B.A.H.D Guys Entertainment Limited" alone.

REGISTRY CONTRADICTIONS. "Wazup Guy: The Album" (30 May 2014) exists as three separate Apple collection IDs for what is nominally the same release: two read "BahdGuys Entertainment Limited" and one reads "Jungle Entertainment Ventures," a split inside a single storefront's own catalogue, not merely between storefronts or registries. "Chemistry" (Falz & Simi, 27 October 2016) is credited "Jungle Entertainment Ventures" alone on Apple; MusicBrainz's release entry for the same recording carries label credits for "BahdGuys Records" and "X3M Music," naming neither Jungle nor each other's Apple counterpart, and Deezer has no entry for this title under Falz's artist ID at all. For "Owa" and "Yakubu" (2023), Deezer's per-album label field names "Dvpper Digital" alone, dropping BahdGuys entirely, where Apple's credit line names both. The same pattern repeats on "Omoge" (2026): Deezer's label field reads "Azuri" alone; Apple names "B.A.H.D Guys Entertainment Limited / Azuri." By contrast, on "Operation Sweep" and "NDI IKE," Deezer fully corroborates Apple, reading "BahdGuys Entertainment Limited, under exclusive license to Jungle Entertainment Ventures" in the label field. Deezer's own two "Wazup Guy" entries read "Bahd Guys Records" for the standard edition and "B.A.H.D Guys Entertainment Limited" (the spelling that does not otherwise appear on Apple until 2022) for the deluxe edition of the same 2014 album, suggesting Deezer's deluxe-edition metadata was re-tagged at a later date using the current legal name rather than the name in use in 2014. MusicBrainz treats "BahdGuys Records" (label ID 8fc4d193-4675-4236-bb40-a7d89e83ad44, disambiguated "Nigerian Record Label, owned by rapper Falz") and "B.A.H.D Guys Entertainment Limited" (label ID 64d03910-7ea4-4a20-a08b-07ec06a62bf7, no disambiguation) as two separate label entities rather than one evolving name.

WHAT IS NOT ESTABLISHED. No advance, fee, royalty split, exclusivity term or contract length for any relationship between BahdGuys and Jungle Entertainment Ventures, Dvpper Digital or Azuri appears in any source located. No agreement date is known for any of the transitions described above; every date in this record is a release date of a record carrying a given credit, not a date on which any contract was signed, amended or ended. No source explains why Jungle's name disappeared from new-release credits after April 2021 and then returned in August 2023, nor why Dvpper's name, present through 2023, is absent from every release from June 2024 onward. No Nigerian CAC filing or company registration document was located for BahdGuys under any of its four name spellings; ownership of the imprint by Falz rests on MusicBrainz's label disambiguation text, not on a corporate filing. Nigeria's Corporate Affairs Commission has no public search API, and the CAC aggregator ng-check.com, used elsewhere on this site for Nigerian company checks, returned no result for this entity.

INDEPENDENT TRADE CORROBORATION. The NATIVE's coverage of Jungle Entertainment Ventures' and Free Me Digital's 2020 withdrawal from Boomplay names Falz directly as one of the artists Jungle distributed at the time: "Jungle Entertainment Ventures and Free Me Digital, music distributors for many of our favourite musicians from Falz and Adekunle Gold to Ajebutter 22 and P Square have recently pulled their entire music catalogue from Boomplay Music." This corroborates the existence of a Falz-Jungle distribution relationship independently of the phonogram credits, though it does not itself date any particular switch or state any terms.

EXCLUSIONS. Releases on which Falz appears as a featured or guest artist on another party's release are excluded from this ownership trail, since the phonogram credit in each case names the lead artist's own label, not BahdGuys: "Ashewo" (Nasboi & 2Baba, 2025, credited to Eminent Transglobal Sounds Record Limited under exclusive license to ONErpm), "Arise" and "Safe" (Mavin Global Holdings Ltd, 2020 and 2026), "Cross My Lane" (Broda Shaggi, under exclusive license to Mad Solutions LLC), "Secure the Bag" (Masterkraft / ONErpm, 2021), "Thunda" (Topboy, 2020), "Currently" (Flyboy I.N.C, 2021), "Ginger" (SOF Recordings, Jagz Nation, B.A.H.D Guys jointly credited, 2025, excluded because Igho and Jesse Jagz are the billed leads), "Win" (Timaya & Falz, credited to DM Records Limited, 2019), and every other collaboration in the 161-row catalogue where a different label is named in the phonogram credit.

Territory

Not stated by any party as a defined territory. No phonogram credit in the catalogue carries a territorial qualifier at any point. The Apple iTunes Lookup API was queried on both the Nigeria and United States storefronts for the full 161-release catalogue; every shared release (158 of 161 IDs, the remainder being alternate collection IDs for the same titles) returned an identical copyright string on both storefronts, and every release is on sale on both. That is consistent with worldwide distribution under whichever name is credited at a given time, but no source states a territory, and this record does not assert one.

Announced

2014-01-31

Primary document

Rights registry

Sources

Read this before citing: NOTHING WAS ANNOUNCED. No press release, statement or social post from BahdGuys, Falz, Jungle Entertainment Ventures, Dvpper Digital or Azuri marking any of the switches described in this record was located. The dates recorded are release dates of records carrying a given credit, not dates of any agreement, which are unknown in every case.

NO AMOUNT EXISTS ANYWHERE. No advance, fee, royalty rate, minimum guarantee or term length for any of the arrangements described appears in any source located. "Not disclosed" is the accurate entry for amount and currency, not a placeholder for a figure this desk failed to find.

BAHDGUYS' OWNERSHIP RESTS ON A REGISTRY DISAMBIGUATION, NOT A FILING. Nigeria's Corporate Affairs Commission has no public search API. No result for any of BahdGuys' four name spellings was found via the ng-check.com aggregator this site uses elsewhere for Nigerian company checks, and the domain bahdguys.com.ng does not resolve. The claim that Falz owns the imprint rests on MusicBrainz's label disambiguation text ("Nigerian Record Label, owned by rapper Falz"), a registry source, not a company filing or a statement from Falz himself.

A WEB SEARCH RETURNED AN UNVERIFIABLE CLAIM AND IT WAS NOT USED. A search for BahdGuys' company history returned a summary claiming the company's own website describes a 2019 founding. That claim could not be checked because the cited domain does not resolve in DNS, and it conflicts with the earliest dated phonogram credit found in this record, a 2009 mixtape. It is recorded here as discarded, not as a source.

DEEZER'S LABEL FIELD IS A SINGLE STRING AND OFTEN DROPS THE OWNER NAME. On both occasions a third-party distributor is named alongside BahdGuys on Apple (Dvpper Music in 2023, Azuri in 2026), Deezer's per-album label field names only the distributor, not BahdGuys. On the one occasion Jungle Entertainment Ventures is named as exclusive licensee (August 2023), Deezer's label field fully corroborates Apple's wording. This is recorded as a difference in how each registry formats a compound credit, not as a resolved contradiction over who is actually named.

APPLE'S OWN CATALOGUE CONTAINS AN INTERNAL SPLIT. "Wazup Guy: The Album" (2014) exists as three separate collection IDs on the same storefront, two crediting BahdGuys and one crediting Jungle, for what is nominally one release. This desk cannot determine from the data available which ID reflects the credit in force at release or whether one was corrected after the fact.

UK COMPANIES HOUSE AND NIGERIA'S CAC WERE NOT CHECKED BEYOND THE AGGREGATOR NOTED ABOVE. This record relies on music-registry data and one piece of independently verified trade coverage. No first-party corporate filing was obtained for BahdGuys, Jungle Entertainment Ventures or Dvpper Digital in the course of compiling this record; Jungle Entertainment Ventures' and Dvpper Digital's existing company records on this site, cited as parties here, were compiled separately by the Directory Desk and are linked, not re-verified, in this deal record.

Deal sheet

Two newsletters. Zero fluff. Take your pick.

Cookies on Afrobeats Wire

Cookie preferences