Open Mic Productions (Pty) Ltd owns the master recording of “Jerusalema”. Warner Music France SAS holds an exclusive licence to it, and an exclusive licence is not ownership. That distinction has survived the song’s entire commercial life, a global dance craze and three years of litigation, and it is written plainly on the record itself. The credit line reads: “Exclusive licence Warner Music France, Label Elektra France, ℗ 2020 Open Mic Productions.”
Underneath that licence sits a second arrangement that has been reported almost everywhere as a royalty row and almost nowhere as what it actually is: a 50/50 joint venture, covering two unreleased albums, that a South African court has ruled Nomcebo Zikode is contractually bound to enter, with a Warner Music Group company named in the settlement as the conduit.
What Warner licensed, and what it did not buy#
On 4 August 2020 Warner Music Group’s Elektra France announced an exclusive deal for Master KG’s album Jerusalema. The announcement said Elektra France would hold the rights for the album worldwide excluding Sub-Saharan Africa, where they would be looked after by Warner Music Group’s ADA, and that the signing came through Warner’s partnership with Africori and with Open Mic Productions, the label Master KG was signed to.
Read that announcement for the terms that decide who gets paid and they are absent. No advance. No royalty rate. No term. No expiry. Warner Music France’s president said Master KG had “through Open Mic Productions made an incredible album”. Open Mic’s two named chief executives said they had “welcomed this opportunity for Master KG with both hands”. Nobody named a number, and nobody has since.
What can be established is the shape of the grant, because the shape is recorded in the product. Across 84 release records in Master KG’s Apple catalogue, every Jerusalema release carrying a Warner credit carries it as an exclusive licence, with the phonogram symbol attached to Open Mic Productions: the album, the edit, the Burna Boy remix, the Feder, HUGEL and Riton remixes. The 2021 European vinyl pressing, barcode 0190295025274, says the same thing on the sleeve in three separate credits: phonographic copyright Open Mic Productions, copyright Open Mic Productions, licensed to Warner Music France.
The corporate register agrees. Warner Music Group Corp.’s FY2025 Form 10-K, Exhibit 21.1, lists Warner Music France SAS, Alternative Distribution Alliance, Africori Limited and Africori SA PTY LTD among its subsidiaries. Open Mic Productions appears nowhere in it. Warner does not own the company that owns the record.
The joint venture a court wrote#
Nomcebo Zikode signed with Open Mic Productions in September 2018. “Jerusalema” was released by Open Mic in 2019. In September 2022 she released “Bayethe”, which was nominated for a Grammy, and the relationship broke. She brought urgent interdict proceedings, and on 15 December 2022 the parties settled at the doors of the court. On the same day the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria made that settlement an order of court.
That is the moment the next deal was struck, and it was struck under judicial supervision rather than in a negotiation an artist could walk away from. The settlement’s “Future Recordings” clause reads: “The Parties have agreed that Nomcebo Nkwanyana through her company Emazulwini Productions will enter into a 50/50 Joint Venture agreement within 60 (sixty) days of the Effective Date of this agreement in relation to the Future Recordings. The Future Recordings, will be released by the Joint Venture via Africori. The parties agree that Africori will act as a conduit facilitating the interaction between the two parties.”
The settlement defines the Future Recordings as “the next two albums only, to be delivered by Nomcebo, which will be recorded by Nomcebo through her record label Emazulwini Productions in a joint venture partnership with Open Mic Productions and released by Africori”. Zikode’s own affidavit, quoted in the judgment, describes the framework more bluntly: the joint venture “would fund and co-own my next two albums”. Her affidavit also records that “at that stage, the understanding was that the albums would be released by Universal Music”.
They were not routed to Universal. They were routed to Africori, which by December 2022 was already a Warner Music Group majority-owned company, and which Warner took full ownership of on 11 February 2025. The artist’s stated expectation was a release through one major, and the executed settlement pointed at a company inside another.
Almost a year later, Zikode asked the court to declare that she was not bound to conclude the joint venture, arguing the clause was an unenforceable agreement to agree, and separately asked for an order compelling Open Mic to account more fully for income from “Jerusalema”. The accounting clause she sought to enforce reads: “Open Mic Productions will provide full accounting of any artist royalties or bookings income, sync income and brand endorsement deals concluded for the song ‘Jerusalema’ and all other Existing Recordings and other amounts due in terms of this agreement.” The judge observed that both parties accepted the settlement “was poorly drafted and not a model of clarity”, and that “or” in that clause means “a choice between two or more options, where only one of the options is selected”.
On 9 May 2025 the application was dismissed with costs. The court held that the Future Recordings clause “is a valid, enforceable agreement to jointly deliver two albums using the JV only as a vehicle”, and that “Zikode is bound by the agreed terms”. Leave to appeal was refused on 24 July 2025. Neither judgment states a sum of money, for costs or for anything else.
Four relationships, routinely collapsed into one#
This story only reads clearly if four things are kept apart. Open Mic Productions owns the master: it is the named phonogram owner on every credit checked. Warner Music France licenses that master exclusively and releases it as Elektra France. Africori distributes, and in the settlement is given the narrower role of “conduit”. Nobody has publicly established who administers the publishing in the underlying composition, which is a separate copyright with a separate income stream.
That last gap matters more than it looks. The song’s authorship is itself contested: the 9 May 2025 judgment expressly records a dispute over whether Zikode and Master KG co-authored the work, and expressly declines to decide it. A composition whose ownership is unresolved is a composition whose publishing income is hard to route. The same owner-licenses-to-major structure, done cleanly, is visible in Burna Boy’s arrangement with Atlantic and in Ayra Starr’s with Republic.
What could not be established#
The term and expiry of the Elektra France licence are not stated in any document retrieved. Neither is any advance, royalty rate or cash consideration, for the licence or for the joint venture. Neither judgment states a legal costs figure, so figures circulating for those costs are not treated here as established. The publishing chain is unresolved on both counts: two mechanical and performance registries were unreachable from our systems, and no party has published a writer or publisher split.
Whether the 50/50 joint venture company was ever actually incorporated could not be confirmed. What can be said is what the catalogue shows: Zikode has released no album since the December 2022 order, and every solo release of hers from October 2023 to March 2026 is credited to Emazulwini Productions alone, with no joint-venture credit and no Africori credit in the phonogram line. That is an absence of evidence, not evidence of a breach, and it is recorded here as unresolved.
What this means for artists#
An exclusive licence is a loan, not a sale, and you should be able to say when it ends. Open Mic kept the copyright in “Jerusalema” and handed Warner the exclusive right to exploit it outside Sub-Saharan Africa. That is a good structure for the owner. It is only a good structure if the owner knows the term. No public document says when this one expires, and an artist signing a comparable grant should treat the term and the reversion date as the first two questions, ahead of the advance.
A settlement made an order of court is a record deal with teeth. Zikode settled to end an urgent application and, in doing so, committed to fund and co-own her next two albums with the counterparty she had just sued. When the agreement became a court order, the ordinary contractual escape routes closed: the court held that a party who wants out must seek rescission or variation of the order, not a declaration that the clause is meaningless. Anything signed at the door of a court should be read as though it will be enforced for years, because it will be.
Check who owns the conduit. The settlement named Africori as a neutral-sounding facilitator between two parties. Africori was already majority-owned by a major, and is now wholly owned by one. A distributor named in your contract is not a piece of plumbing; it is a company with a parent, and the parent can change during the life of your deal, as it did repeatedly across Warner’s South African acquisitions.
Get the accounting clause drafted properly. The clause Zikode tried to enforce was found to be poorly drafted by both sides’ own admission, and the single word “or” in it was enough to defeat the attempt to compel disclosure of sync income, bookings, endorsements and the royalty base. An accounting clause should list every income category with “and”, should name a reporting frequency, and should specify an audit right. That is cheap to negotiate before signature and close to impossible to fix afterwards.
The full document trail, including both judgments, the credit lines, the vinyl credits and the subsidiary list, is in the deal record.
