Sony Music UK and 5K Records Signed Libianca in December 2022. No Release Since June 2024 Has Carried Either Name.

Sony Music UK signed the Cameroonian-American singer Libianca in December 2022, through a joint imprint called 5K Records, on the strength of a single TikTok clip. The phonogram credit that ran on every release for the next eighteen months names both companies as joint rights holders. Then, in the middle of 2024, that credit stopped appearing, and nothing has replaced it with a second label. Nine releases since have carried nine different distributor names, none of them Sony’s.

What the credit line actually says

Libianca, born Libianca Fonji, auditioned for NBC’s The Voice in 2021 and reached the top 20 before elimination. She returned home and kept building West Side Creative Agency (WSCA), a development studio she had co-founded with the producer Yung M3tro, which doubled as her release vehicle: her two singles from that period, “Thank You” and “Special Lovin’,” are self-credited to Libianca, and a Voice-era cover, “Everything I Wanted,” carries the phonogram line “℗ 2021 West Side Creative Agency LLC.”

In November 2022, an A&R at 5K Records found a song snippet Libianca had posted to TikTok about depression and drinking. 5K Records is a small London-registered label, founded in June 2020 by the producer Jae5 together with Mohamed Magid Bah and Mohamed Alieu Jalloh, and widely described in trade coverage as a joint venture with Sony Music UK. The label moved fast: “People” was released on 6 December 2022, weeks after the TikTok clip surfaced. Its phonogram credit, verified directly on the release’s own Apple Music page and matching across five storefronts checked (United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Nigeria and Germany), reads: “℗ 2022 under exclusive licence to 5K Records Limited / Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited.” No party is named as licensor. The line states only who holds the exclusive licence, not who granted it.

That exact two-name credit then ran, unchanged, across every subsequent Libianca release for eighteen months: three further versions of “People” (with Ayra Starr and Omah Lay, a Cian Ducrot remix, and a version with Becky G) between March and April 2023, then “Jah” and its Colors Show recording in June and July 2023, then the four-track Walk Away EP on 8 December 2023. That is seven releases in thirteen months carrying an identical rights credit, the strongest kind of consistency this kind of record can show.

What Companies House shows, and what it does not

5K Records Limited (company number 12658751) is active on the UK register, incorporated 10 June 2020 and classified under sound recording and music publishing activities. Its register of persons with significant control names three individuals, Mohamed Alieu Jalloh, Jonathan Kweku Awotwe Mensah and Mohamed Magid Bah, each holding more than 25 but not more than 50 per cent of shares and voting rights. No Sony entity appears on that register as a shareholder, and no shareholding entity at all is recorded beyond the three named individuals. Jonathan Dickins, the artist manager who represents Adele through September Management, joined the board as a director in June 2023, six months into the Libianca run and roughly a year before the label’s credit line stops appearing on her releases; no source checked explains his appointment or connects it to the rights structure described here.

That matters because “joint venture” is doing a lot of work in how this label has been described. A joint venture in the ownership sense would ordinarily show up as a shared shareholding, exactly the structure this database has already found, and reported as absent, in a comparable Def Jam Africa deal with a different label. Here, the company register shows 5K Records as independently owned by three named UK music-industry figures, with Sony’s involvement visible only in the phonogram credit and in trade description of the arrangement, not in the equity. Whether Sony holds a stake through a vehicle that does not appear on the public register, an option, a distribution and marketing agreement dressed up in joint-venture language, or something else again could not be established from any source checked.

Where the credit breaks, and where it does not do so cleanly

No further Libianca lead single or EP appears in Apple’s catalogue between the December 2023 EP and April 2024. On 24 April 2024, “Gods People” arrived credited “℗ 2024 Libianca, under exclusive global distribution license to Encore Recordings,” a Beverly Hills-based independent label distributed through Sony’s The Orchard, whose own roster includes South Africa’s Uncle Waffles. That is Libianca named as her own rights holder, working through a different distributor entirely, with no mention of 5K Records or Sony Music Entertainment UK.

Six weeks later, on 7 June 2024, “Darling” reversed that pattern: “℗ 2024 Relentless Records under exclusive licence to Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited,” again identical across every storefront checked. Relentless is a Sony Music UK label, but not, on the evidence available, a company in its own right: the two UK-registered companies that have carried the name “Relentless Records” are both dissolved, one in 2017 and one in 2021, which is consistent with Relentless operating today as a trading name inside Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited rather than as a separately owned entity the way 5K Records is. That distinction is not a contradiction this record is smoothing over so much as one it is flagging directly: two consecutive Libianca releases, six weeks apart, carry rights credits from two different parts of the same corporate family, and no announcement anywhere explains the switch from 5K Records to Relentless.

“Darling” is the last release in Libianca’s catalogue, checked track by track through July 2026, to carry any Sony-linked name. Nothing has replaced it with a second label deal. What has followed instead, across the eighteen months since, is: “Side” (Boy Alone / Eagle Plug), “Promiscuous” (BT Music Worldwide, under exclusive license to Easier Said, LLC), “Up or Down” (BVMG / MAD Solutions LLC), “No Water” (WSCA/Soundscope), “NOBODY” (Ziiki Media, the Sandton-headquartered Pan-African distributor this database has covered in a separate record), “I Believe In Better” (West Side Creative Agency, her own pre-Sony imprint, now apparently in use again), “Don’t Say Sorry” (Cyanhill Music), “Let Me Be In Your Arms” (Solotoko) and “I Know” (WSCA again). Nine releases, seven distinct organisational names once the WSCA variants are treated as one, and no two of them match. No source checked, official or otherwise, states that the Sony/5K Records deal ended, was not renewed, or expired on its own term. What the phonogram trail shows, without needing that announcement, is that whatever exclusivity the 2022 credit line described has not applied to anything Libianca has released since June 2024.

What this means for artists

The clearest lesson here is about what a phonogram credit can and cannot tell an artist’s own team. For eighteen months it was an unambiguous, storefront-verifiable record of who controlled the recordings, updated identically worldwide on every release. When the underlying deal changed, or lapsed, or was not renewed, nothing was issued to say so. The credit line simply stopped appearing, and the catalogue fragmented across seven distributors in the space the deal used to occupy, with no public document marking the transition either way.

The second lesson is about the word “joint venture” itself. It gets used, in coverage of deals like this one, to describe A&R partnerships, marketing arrangements and equity structures interchangeably, and only one of those three is a statement about who owns the resulting company. An artist being courted by a label described that way is owed a straight answer to a narrow question: is the other party a shareholder, a licensee, or neither, and where does that show up on a public register. In this case, the answer that the UK company register actually gives is neither of the first two for Sony, whatever the trade description says.

None of this establishes wrongdoing by any party named here. Deals lapse, options go unexercised and artists move on to independent distribution constantly, and an eighteen-month major-label run that produced a globally charting single is not a failure by any ordinary measure. What it does establish is that an artist’s rights history is written in the metadata whether or not anyone announces it, and that reading it carefully tells a more precise story than the original press language ever did.