Six digital editions of recordings by Femi Kuti and his son Mádé Kuti exist on the Nigerian Apple Music storefront and on no other storefront we tested. All six name Chocolate City on the copyright line. The worldwide editions of the same recordings name Partisan Records and mention Chocolate City nowhere. Neither company has ever said this happened.
That is the whole finding, and it is worth being precise about what it is and is not. It is not a sale. On two of the six editions the credit uses the exact industry formulation for a licence: “℗ 2021 Partisan Records under exclusive license to Chocolate City LTD”. That wording keeps ownership of the recording with Partisan and grants Chocolate City the exclusive right to exploit it. On the other four the credit reads “Chocolate City Music” alone, with no licensor named at all.
Those two forms describe different legal positions. They were delivered by the same parties, for the same body of work, into the same storefront, within four months of each other.
What the Nigerian storefront shows#
Apple’s catalogue endpoint returns 30 album-level editions for Femi Kuti on the Nigerian storefront. It returns 26 on the United States storefront and 26 on the United Kingdom. For Mádé Kuti the figures are 17 against 13 and 13. The surplus is not a rounding error or a regional licensing gap. It is a parallel set of deliveries that exists only in Nigeria.
The six with a Chocolate City credit, in order of release, are Mádé Kuti’s single Free Your Mind of 15 October 2020 and its radio edit the following day, both reading “℗ 2020 Chocolate City Music”; Femi Kuti’s As We Struggle Everyday (Edit) of 21 January 2021, reading “℗ 2021 Partisan Records under exclusive license to Chocolate City LTD”; and then, all on 5 February 2021, Mádé Kuti’s album For(e)ward and the combined double album Legacy +, both crediting Chocolate City Music alone, and Femi Kuti’s Stop The Hate, which again names Partisan as licensor and Chocolate City as exclusive licensee.
We tested the absence four ways. The identical Apple collection identifiers return no result in the United States, United Kingdom, French and South African storefronts. Requested directly, three of those identifiers resolve on the Nigerian domain and return a 404 on the American one. The South African check matters on its own: this is a Nigeria grant, not a pan-African one.
The Legacy + page on the Nigerian storefront was fetched in full. The page body renders the string “℗ 2021 Chocolate City Music”. It is live.
Neither company mentions it#
Chocolate City Music’s own website was read end to end. Its current roster page lists Young Jonn, Blaqbonez, Candy Bleakz, Tar1q, Major AJ and Noon Dave. Its separate Legacy Artist page lists MI Abaga, CKay, Ice Prince, Jesse Jagz, Nosa Omoregie, Victoria Kimani, Koker, Dice Ailes, Ruby Gyang, Brymo, DJ Lambo and DJ Cinch. Neither Kuti appears on either page.
Partisan Records’ own Femi Kuti artist page runs to several hundred words on the Shrine, on Afrobeat and on Journey Through Life. It does not mention Chocolate City, Nigeria as a territory, or any licensing arrangement.
There is an earlier relationship, and it is not this one. In December 2014 Chocolate City sealed a deal with Femi Kuti that its then chief executive Audu Maikori described on the record as covering business development, representation, and getting him to perform at local shows and concerts. That is management. Management is not a rights grant, and nobody at the time described it as one. Femi Kuti declined to disclose the terms. Six years later a Chocolate City phonogram claim appears on his recordings in Nigeria, and the step in between is not on any public record we could find.
The first six years of the catalogue belong to Universal#
Everything above concerns the post-2008 catalogue. The earlier work sits somewhere else entirely, and this is the part most coverage of Femi Kuti gets wrong by omission.
His 1995 debut carries the line “A Tabu Records Release; ℗ 1995 UMG Recordings, Inc.” Shoki Shoki (1998) and Fight to Win (2001) both read Barclay, a Universal Music France imprint. Shoki Shoki carries a 2025 phonogram year, which signals that the owner re-delivered the recording last year. A refreshed phonogram year is a re-delivery, not a change of owner.
So the answer to “who owns Femi Kuti’s masters” is not one company. Universal holds the 1995 to 2001 records. Partisan is the named phonogram owner from 2008 onward.
A third contradiction, this one worldwide#
Partisan’s claim is broader than its release history, and the registries do not agree with it.
Day By Day (2008) was issued on Wrasse Records in the United Kingdom, Mercer Street Records in the United States and Labelmaison in France. None of those three appears on its copyright line today, which reads Partisan Records. Africa For Africa (2011) and One People One World (2018) were issued on Knitting Factory Records catalogue numbers KFR1113CD and KFR1142-2. Both now read Partisan Records worldwide, and Knitting Factory appears on neither.
No document we located explains when or how Partisan came to hold those recordings. We are not asserting that it bought them. We are recording that the label credit and the phonogram credit tell two different stories about the same three albums.
There is one more. No Place For My Dream (2013) is returned twice on every storefront tested, once as “℗ 2013 Label Maison” and once as “℗ 2013 Partisan Records”. Two live ownership claims on the same album, delivered to the same service, neither withdrawn.
Knitting Factory does surface once, and only in Nigeria. A twelve-track edition of One People One World on the Nigerian storefront reads “℗ 2018 Knitting Factory Records Inc. / Femi Kuti”. That credit names the artist himself as a co-owner of the recording. The fourteen-track worldwide edition of the same album names Partisan alone.
Mádé Kuti now owns his own records#
The generational contrast is sharp. Since 2 May 2025 every Mádé Kuti release, including the album Chapter 1: Where Does Happiness Come From? of 25 July 2025, reads “℗ 2025 Mádé Kuti” on both the Nigerian and American storefronts. Neither Partisan nor Chocolate City appears.
No announcement of a departure, a reversion or a buy-back was located, so we are not calling it any of those things. What the credit establishes is that the recordings he has released since May 2025 are claimed by him personally and by no company.
What this means for artists#
Three practical points come out of this.
First, a territory carve-out can exist without anyone announcing it. If you have signed a worldwide deal and your records still show up at home under a local company’s name, that local arrangement is real, it affects who collects in your largest domestic market, and you will not find it in a press release. Check your own storefront in your own country against a foreign one. It takes ten minutes and it is the single cheapest audit available to an African artist.
Second, the wording on the copyright line is the contract’s shadow, and the words are not interchangeable. “Under exclusive license to” means someone else still owns the recording. A company name standing alone means that company is claiming to own it. When your catalogue carries both forms for the same project, somebody’s metadata is wrong, and metadata that is wrong at the delivery stage is what royalty disputes are built out of years later.
Third, the label on the sleeve and the owner on the file are different facts. Three Femi Kuti albums were released on labels that no longer appear anywhere in their digital ownership data. Nothing about that is necessarily improper. Catalogues move, companies restructure, and distribution changes hands. But an artist who assumes the name on the record is the name that owns the record is working from the wrong document.
What we could not establish#
The consideration. No advance, royalty rate or lump sum appears in any source. We are not putting a number on this, and no number should be inferred from the fact that a licence exists.
Whether “Chocolate City Music” and “Chocolate City LTD”, the two names used across the six editions, are the same registered entity. Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission publishes no API and we did not perform a manual lookup.
Whether Partisan Records and Knitting Factory Records Inc. are corporately related. Trade coverage says they are. We searched the UK register for both and found neither: the only Knitting Factory result is an unrelated dissolved company, number 08201620. No United States state register was reachable from here.
Whether the Nigerian arrangement is still contractually in force, as distinct from the credit still appearing on the storefront. One data point suggests it did not continue: Journey Through Life, released on 25 April 2025, returns a single Nigerian edition reading Partisan Records, with no Chocolate City parallel.
The publishing chain, which is separate from all of the above and was not established.
