Buying the Machine, Not the Catalogue
Most African music catalogues already have a distributor or label-services firm sitting on the revenue
An origination exercise for an international music-rights investor put me in a room with an operator who has spent two decades inside African music deals. I laid out the thesis I’d carried in: find catalogues that still sit directly with the rights-holder, negotiate direct, avoid the layers. He let me finish. Most of the catalogue worth having, he said, isn’t sitting untouched anymore. Distributors and label-services companies have spent years advancing money to commercially interesting artists and independent labels, and in exchange they’ve secured a position on the revenue those catalogues throw off. His point was that the clean deal, the one where you find an undercapitalised rights-holder and negotiate a straightforward acquisition, may be less available than the standard origination thesis assumes.
That’s one operator’s read on the market. It also turns out to describe, fairly accurately, how a meaningful part of the market actually works.
What’s actually happening to the catalogue
Nigerian industry reporting describes the pattern plainly. Label-services firms offer the artist an advance and license the artist’s music for an agreed number of years, while recouping through streaming revenue and possibly publishing, and a number of them have started looking into quasi-360 deals that give them a better chance at recouping their outlay through sync, neighbouring rights, performance royalties, mechanical and more. The firms doing this in the Nigerian market alone run from local operators to Platoon, EMPIRE Distribution, OneRPM, Vydia, Believe, Ditto, Africori and more. These arrangements aren’t limited to individual performers. Distributors and label-services companies contract with independent labels on similar terms, advancing against a slate rather than a single artist.
This isn’t an obscure financing structure. It has become an important part of how capital reaches independent artists and labels in Nigeria.
It’s worth being precise about what these arrangements do and don’t do. They don’t necessarily transfer the underlying copyright. The relevant master may remain with the artist or the independent label that signed it, while composition rights sit with a publisher, an administrator, or the writer directly, under a separate agreement entirely. What changes is the contractual architecture around the cash flow: who collects it, who participates in it, what gets recouped first, and, in broader arrangements, which additional revenue streams fall within the intermediary’s economics. Hear “intermediated” and assume “acquired,” and the diligence is compromised before it starts.
Commercially interesting African music can now sit behind a distributor or label-services company that has already advanced capital and holds a contractual position around the resulting revenues, regardless of whether the underlying rights sit with the artist, an independent label, or another rights-owning entity. The catalogue hasn’t necessarily disappeared. The route to its economics has changed.
Why that changes what you’re actually buying
A standard catalogue-acquisition model assumes ownership, economic participation, and practical control of the cash flow all sit in one place. In an intermediated market they don’t. The copyright might sit with the rights-holder. Economic participation in the revenue might sit partly with the distributor, under a recoupment schedule with years left to run. Collection, who the DSP actually pays, might sit with a third party. Exploitation authority, who can license the catalogue for sync or a new use, might sit with a fourth.
Skip past that distinction and the risk isn’t just overpaying. It’s misidentifying the asset. You can spend months negotiating what you assume is a clean catalogue acquisition and discover, near signing, that the copyright you can acquire remains subject to someone else’s contractual economics for years to come, or that the most attractive cash-flow interest in the deal sits with an intermediary whose position you cannot acquire without its consent.
What you’re actually screening for
The instinct is to open diligence by asking who owns the copyright. That skips a prior question: what exactly is the investable asset. A master copyright, a composition, a royalty interest, a contractual economic participation, a receivable, some other contractual right, none of these are interchangeable, and a single catalogue can contain several of them stacked on top of one another.
From there: who owns it. Who else participates economically in the revenue, and on what terms. Who controls collection, meaning who actually receives and accounts for the money. Who controls exploitation, meaning who can make the licensing decisions that generate new revenue in the first place. What’s transferable, and whose consent that transfer requires. For how long, including termination, reversion, and renewal. And what has to be recouped or discharged before the buyer’s own economics begin.
Run a catalogue through that sequence and you learn quickly whether you’re looking at a clean acquisition, an income stream layered under someone else’s advance, or a position that can’t move at all without a third party’s sign-off.
Where the capital actually goes
Once the catalogue and its economics stop being the same thing by default, the opportunity separates into three levels.
Rights. Acquiring an identifiable copyright, royalty interest, or other transferable economic interest directly. This is the deal everyone pitches, and the one the standard model was built for. It’s also a pool that gets smaller once existing distribution, label-services, and financing arrangements across a given catalogue are properly mapped.
Portfolio. A distributor holding a hundred advances against a hundred rights-holders has something that starts to resemble a portfolio of contract-backed cash flows recouping on different timelines. Whether that’s financeable, through a portfolio facility, a forward-flow arrangement, or an outright purchase of the position, comes down to the less glamorous questions: assignment rights, remaining term, revenue volatility, who controls the collection account, concentration across artists and labels, recoupment status, and what happens to the position on termination or a change of control at the distributor. Where the underlying rights and contract terms allow it, this is a distinct financing trade in its own right. Where they don’t, the size of the aggregate cash flow stops mattering.
Platform. Investing in, or acquiring, the institution that repeatedly originates, administers, and monetises these positions, rather than any single catalogue or portfolio it currently holds.
These are not three ways to finance the same asset. They’re three different underwriting propositions. Rights requires conviction in the asset. Portfolio requires conviction in the cash flows. Platform requires conviction in the machine.
A platform doing this repeatedly can also accumulate something a buyer of isolated catalogues never sees: which genres and artist profiles actually recoup, how quickly revenue arrives and decays, where consumption concentrates geographically, how advance size correlates with eventual return. Over enough transactions, that becomes underwriting data an outside acquirer analysing isolated catalogues may struggle to replicate. The machine doesn’t just originate assets. It learns from originating them.
The clearest public evidence sits at the platform level
Warner Music invested in Africori, then Africa’s largest independent distributor, in 2020, took a majority stake in 2022, and completed its acquisition on 12 February 2025, by which point Africori represented more than 7,000 artists. At the 2020 investment, Africori had worked with more than 6,500 artists and 700 labels; by the 2022 stake, roughly 7,000 artists and 850 clients.
Warner described the original investment as giving it access to Africori’s largest catalog and A&R network. The significance wasn’t simply exposure to existing music. It was access to the infrastructure and relationships through which more of it could be found and distributed.
What Warner acquired, in other words, was the company sitting across thousands of artist and label relationships, along with its distribution infrastructure, its rights-management operation, and the A&R capability that keeps finding the next act worth advancing. That’s the platform trade, playing out in public, at a scale most catalogue-by-catalogue origination strategies would take years to approximate.
The paradox underneath it
The same intermediary layer that can make a pristine catalogue acquisition harder to find can also make African music cash flows more legible to institutional capital. A distributor with a working recoupment schedule, reasonably clean metadata, and an actual collection track record has already produced documentation an institutional investor would otherwise have to build from nothing, in a market where historical paperwork is often incomplete and cross-border licensing stays genuinely fragmented. Payment history, administration records, and observable recoupment behaviour amount to underwriting infrastructure, even as the layers built on top of them create contractual complexity. Neither cancels the other. It’s not a substitute for legal, financial, or commercial diligence. It’s a reason diligence has something real to work with. Not every catalogue needs an intermediary to become financeable, but where one exists with a genuine track record, it changes what diligence starts from.
As existing revenue streams become better administered and genuinely new ones, including potentially AI-related licensing, develop, the institutional value of clean rights records and clear licensing authority could reasonably increase, because each revenue line is only collectable by whoever already controls licensing on the relevant catalogue. That’s a hypothesis about where value accrues next, not a premium anyone has priced yet. It doesn’t replace the question of who owns what today.
Where this leaves the diligence conversation
None of this suggests African catalogue value has vanished into a handful of distributor balance sheets. The evidence supports meaningful intermediation in specific markets, not a market that’s fully locked up. But it does suggest the obvious deal was never the only deal. For institutional capital approaching African music rights, the intermediary an investor is looking past on the way to the rights-holder may itself be the more interesting asset.
Before asking who owns the catalogue, establish what the investable asset actually is.
Then ask where the opportunity sits: Rights, Portfolio, or Platform. At the first level, you’re underwriting the asset. At the second, the cash flows. At the third, you’re underwriting the machine that keeps finding the next asset before you do.