On 19 May 2016, Sony Music Entertainment Africa signed the Tanzanian singer Alikiba to what was announced as a “global deal”. Nobody said what kind of deal it was. The first single released under it answers the question in a line of small print: “℗ 2016 SME Africa (Pty) Ltd exclusively licensed from KingKiba Music.”
Sony did not buy Alikiba’s masters. It licensed them, exclusively, from a company called KingKiba Music. On the phonogram convention, the party named after the words “exclusively licensed from” is the owner of the sound recording, and the party named before them is not. The announcement gave the public a headline. The credit line gave it the structure.
What actually changed hands#
A right to exploit, for a period, in exchange for terms nobody has disclosed. That is the whole of what is established. No catalogue was sold in 2016. No copyright was assigned. A major label took an exclusive licence over recordings that a smaller company continued to own, and put its own name at the front of the credit, which is standard and is also where most of the confusion in African music reporting begins.
Three words get used as though they were interchangeable, and they are not. To own a master is to hold title in the recording. To license it is to hold a bounded permission to exploit something somebody else owns. To distribute it is to perform a service, moving a finished record to the shops and the platforms, usually for a fee or a percentage, with no claim on the copyright at all. Sony held the second of those. The credit line says so in Sony’s own metadata.
The credit line, release by release#
Alikiba’s catalogue was checked release by release against Apple’s catalogue lookup, which returns the phonogram string a rights holder delivered with the record. The sequence is unusually clean.
Before the signing, the credit names either his own label, Kings Music Records Label, or his legal name, Ally Salehe Kiba. The 2009 album Ali K 4Real reads “℗ 2009 Kings Music Records Label”.
After the signing, Sony appears, and never alone for long. Aje, released on 24 June 2016, reads “℗ 2016 SME Africa (Pty) Ltd exclusively licensed from KingKiba Music”. Seduce Me, on 25 August 2017, reads “℗ 2017 South Africa – Sony Music Entertainment Africa (Pty) Ltd, under Exclusive License From KingKiba Music”. Kadogo, on 28 December 2018, reads “℗ 2018 Sony Music Entertainment Africa (Pty) Ltd – RCA, under Exclusive License From KingKiba Music”, adding the RCA imprint but keeping the licensor exactly where it was.
Then Sony goes. By Mshumaa, on 8 November 2019, the credit reads “℗ 2019 Kings Music Records Label” and contains no Sony name at all. The masters had come home, or more precisely, they had never left, and the licence over them had lapsed.
A second registry was checked to make sure this was not an artefact of one platform. MusicBrainz records the label on Seduce Me as Sony Music, and on the 2026 singles Bhuju and Utanionea as Ziiki Media. Two independent catalogues, the same story.
Then the licensor disappears#
From 2021, the credit on Alikiba’s records changes shape. The album ONLY ONE KING, released on 7 October 2021, reads “℗ 2021 Ziiki Media”. The single Hater, released on 4 September 2026, reads “℗ 2026 Ziiki Media”. Between those two dates, dozens of releases carry the same string. In none of them is a licensor named after it.
That is a meaningful change in wording. For three years, Sony’s credit went out of its way to name the company it had licensed from. Ziiki Media’s credit names nobody.
The tempting reading is that ownership moved. It should be resisted, for two reasons. Ziiki Media describes its own business as content aggregation and distribution across recorded music, publishing, merchandising and audiovisual content. That is a service role, not an ownership role. And the identical bare credit appears on releases by WCB-Wasafi, the rival Tanzanian label built by Diamond Platnumz, where nobody claims an ownership transfer either. A pattern that shows up across a distributor’s whole client base is far more likely to be that distributor’s delivery convention than a series of coincidental catalogue sales.
So the honest statement is narrow: since 2021 the phonogram position on Alikiba’s records is occupied by a company that describes itself as a distributor, with no owner named behind it, and no party has explained what the arrangement is. Whether Ziiki Media owns, licenses or merely delivers these recordings could not be established.
The same recording, live twice, under two different owners#
The oddest finding is not in the sequence but in the duplication. At least six Alikiba recordings are sitting on the store right now in two parallel listings, with two different stated rights holders.
Aje exists as one listing credited to SME Africa under licence from KingKiba Music, and as a second listing, a different catalogue entry for the same song, credited “℗ 2021 Ziiki Media”. Seduce Me is doubled the same way, once to Sony under licence from KingKiba Music and once to Ziiki Media. Kadogo, Mshumaa, Mwana and Hela all show the same pattern. Both copies of each were live and returning a valid response when checked on 18 September 2026.
This is what a back catalogue re-delivery looks like when the original delivery is never taken down. It is not necessarily improper. It does mean that two commercially available copies of the same Tanzanian recording currently tell a listener, and any royalty system reading that metadata, two different things about who owns it.
Where the accounts do not agree#
The public account of when Sony’s involvement ended does not match the documents, in either direction.
In an interview reported on 20 January 2021, Alikiba said he was no longer working with Rockstar or Sony, adding that he did not want to discuss it until it was completely official. But the credit line had already dropped Sony more than a year earlier, by November 2019. If the relationship ended when he said it did, the records stopped saying so well before.
Pulling the other way, a 2019 release by Aslay featuring Alikiba carries a 2023 phonogram year and reads “℗ 2023 South Africa – Sony Music Entertainment Africa (Pty) Ltd, under exclusive licence from Rockstar Africa Label & Management”. That is a Sony credit dated two years after Alikiba said the relationship was over, and it names an entirely different licensor. Neither party has published a termination date, and Sony Music Entertainment Africa has made no located statement about how or when the arrangement ended.
One more inconsistency deserves recording rather than explaining away. Mwana, a single dated 5 December 2014, carries the credit “℗ 2014 SME Africa (Pty) Ltd”, seventeen months before the signing was announced. A phonogram year is not a delivery date, and catalogue is routinely re-delivered with the original year kept, so this is not evidence of a secret earlier contract. It is simply a credit that does not line up, and it has never been explained.
What this means for artists#
First, the word in the press release is not the deal. “Global deal”, “worldwide deal” and “signed to” describe reach and sentiment, not structure. The structure is in the credit line, and any artist can read their own for free in about a minute. If it names a company after the words “licensed from”, that company owns the recording. If your own company is not that company, find out why before the next release.
Second, an exclusive licence that names your company as licensor is, on the evidence here, a strong position. Alikiba kept title through a major label deal and walked away with his catalogue when it ended. That is the outcome the credit line was protecting. Artists who assign masters outright do not get that, and the difference is invisible in the announcement and permanent in the contract.
Third, watch what happens to the licensor’s name when a distributor takes over. Losing the words “licensed from” does not by itself move a copyright, but it does remove the only public trace of who owns one. Metadata is increasingly what royalty systems read. If your name has quietly stopped appearing in the position that identifies the owner, that is worth a conversation with your distributor, in writing.
Fourth, duplicate listings are a royalty problem before they are anything else. Two live copies of one recording, credited to two different rights holders, is two revenue streams that may not both be reaching the same place.
What could not be established#
Who owns KingKiba Music. The term, territory, advance or royalty rate of the 2016 licence, none of which any party has disclosed. The date that licence ended. Whether any agreement exists between Alikiba and Ziiki Media, and if so what kind. And the publishing side entirely: Apple’s catalogue interface exposes no composition credit, the ASCAP repertory search refused requests from this desk, and Tanzania’s copyright society publishes no searchable repertory. Tanzania also operates no public company register comparable to the UK’s or the United States’, which is why six different company names across one catalogue cannot be resolved into a list of legal persons.
No figure appears anywhere in this piece because no figure appears in any document supporting it. For both the Sony licence and the Ziiki Media arrangement, the consideration is not disclosed.
