Tresor Bought Back His Own Masters From Vth Season in 2024. Apple’s Catalogue Credits Corroborate It.

Tresor’s first two albums, VII and The Beautiful Madness, were released on Vth Season, the South African label that signed him and the late rapper AKA. In October 2024, Tresor’s own company, Jacquel Entertainment Group, acquired the masters to both records for an undisclosed sum. Apple’s catalogue metadata confirms the move at the recording level: the phonogram credit on both albums, and on the AKA-featured single Mount Everest, now reads “Jacquel Entertainment Group,” replacing the “Vth Season” line those releases carried for nearly a decade. This is a clean transfer of ownership, not a licence or a distribution switch, and it is one of the few African catalogue buybacks with both a named seller and a named buyer on the record.

What actually changed hands

Vth Season, co-founded by Raphael Benza and Ninel Musson, signed Tresor early in his career and released VII in 2015 and The Beautiful Madness in 2017, both of which went on to win South African Music Awards for Pop Album of the Year. The same label released AKA’s 2011 debut Altar Ego and, in 2015, a Tresor single featuring AKA, Mount Everest, that carried the joint phonogram credit “Vth Season” and, on a separate international pressing, “Vth Season under exclusive license to Time S.p.A. / Ultra Records, LLC.”

Music In Africa reported on 17 October 2024 that Tresor had acquired the masters to his first two albums outright, through Jacquel Entertainment Group, the company he founded in 2010 to run his own creative and business affairs. The Citizen’s report the same week quoted Tresor directly: “Acquiring the masters of my early work allows me to fully control my catalogue, ensuring that my legacy is protected.” Benza, speaking for the label giving them up, was equally direct: “We’re proud of the journey we had with Tresor and even prouder to see him in a position to acquire the masters and continue to build his legacy.” Under the new arrangement, Vth Season stays involved only in an advisory and marketing capacity on special projects, not as a rights holder.

Neither company disclosed a price. Both accounts describe the sum only as undisclosed, and this record does not estimate one.

The copyright line, not the press release, settles it

Trade coverage of African catalogue moves routinely uses “acquired,” “signed” and “partnered” as if they describe the same kind of transaction. They do not, and the surest way to tell them apart is to read the ℗ line on the recording itself rather than the adjective a headline chose. Checked against Apple’s own catalogue data for Tresor’s discography, the phonogram credit on VII, on its later repackaged edition, on The Beautiful Madness and on the Mount Everest single all now read “Jacquel Entertainment Group,” in place of the “Vth Season” credit attached when those records first came out. That is a rights-holder change recorded at the source, independent of either company’s own account of the deal, and it lines up exactly with what Tresor and Benza both said happened.

It is worth being precise about what this deal is not, because Tresor’s own company history includes an example of the thing this deal is often confused with. In December 2017, Universal Music Africa announced it would support artist development for acts signed to Tresor’s label, a partnership quoted at the time from Sipho Dlamini, Universal Music Africa’s managing director for South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, in language that explicitly framed the arrangement around artist “ownership” rather than Universal acquiring anything. That was a development partnership, seven years before the Vth Season deal and unconnected to it. No source ties the two together, and reading “Universal partnered with Tresor’s label” as “Universal owns Tresor’s masters” would be a straightforward misreading of two different relationships that happen to involve the same artist.

Why an artist buys back his own catalogue

A masters buyback is a narrower and less common transaction in African music reporting than a major-label signing or a distribution deal, because it requires the artist or their company to have the capital to pay for something they do not yet own, and it requires a seller willing to give up a catalogue that, if the artist’s career keeps growing, only gets more valuable. Tresor’s case fits a pattern the industry has started to describe as reclaiming ownership: an established local artist, ten to fifteen years into a career built partly through frontline label investment, uses the leverage and cash flow that success has generated to bring the copyright home.

Jacquel Entertainment Group is not a shell built for this one transaction. It already ran VII Recordings, Tresor’s own imprint, before the buyback, and it has since added Jacquel Dance, a division built around exporting African dance music, and Jacquel Ventures, an investment vehicle the company says was launched with R100 million in capital in November 2023. That existing infrastructure, built before the deal rather than assembled for it, is consistent with a company positioned to hold and exploit a catalogue rather than simply to receive one.

What this means for artists

Read the credit line, not the announcement. A “deal” or a “partnership” in a press release can describe an outright sale, an exclusive licence, a pure distribution arrangement, or a development partnership that transfers nothing at all, and only one of those is what most artists mean when they say they want to “own their masters.” The phonogram credit on the recording itself is the document that says which one actually happened, and it is checkable by anyone, including the artist’s own team, at any time after release.

Build the company before you need it. Jacquel Entertainment Group existed for fourteen years, with its own imprint, before it was in a position to buy Tresor’s masters back. An artist without an incorporated, capitalised rights-holding vehicle in place has nowhere for a reclaimed catalogue to land even if a label is willing to sell.

A label giving up masters is not automatically an adversarial exit. Vth Season’s own co-founder spoke publicly and warmly about the sale, and the label retains a working relationship with Tresor on future projects. Losing a catalogue and losing an artist relationship are not the same event, and conflating them misreads how a buyback like this one can end.

Limits of this record. The ownership sequence is established through Apple’s own catalogue metadata for Tresor’s discography (Apple artist ID 1023015901), read directly rather than through a secondary summary, and cross-checked against Music In Africa’s and The Citizen’s reporting of 17 October 2024, both of which quote Tresor and Vth Season co-founder Raphael Benza by name. Neither report discloses a purchase price, and none was located elsewhere. No source states whether the deal covered the publishing rights in the underlying compositions as distinct from the recordings; this record makes no claim about publishing. The 2017 Universal Music Africa partnership is cited only to distinguish it from this transaction, on the strength of News24’s contemporaneous report quoting Sipho Dlamini. South Africa’s companies registry, the CIPC, has no public API, and no filing for either Vth Season or Jacquel Entertainment Group (Pty) Ltd was consulted; both companies’ structure and history rest on their own statements and on press coverage, not on a registry document.

Correction

Corrected 21 September 2026. The previous headline said Apple’s catalogue credits “confirm” the masters transfer. A phonogram line is a claim, not a deed. It records which company is currently credited as rights holder on a release as delivered to the store, not who holds title to the recording, and this record’s own caveat already treated Apple’s metadata that way. The transfer itself is established by Music In Africa and The Citizen, both reporting on the record with direct quotes. Apple’s re-credit corroborates those accounts rather than confirming them, and the headline has been narrowed from “confirm” to “corroborate”. The underlying finding is unchanged.