The open call
In mid-September 2025, Oluwatosin "Mr Eazi" Ajibade posted a short, almost casual message to his followers: he was buying catalogues, and any African rights-holder who owned their music — with proof, and at least three years of earnings history — could contact his company emPawa Africa to "sell a piece" 2. Days earlier, emPawa had named Miller Williams, a former Senior Vice President of Creative at Kobalt Music who had led catalogue acquisitions there, as Head of Publishing for its Lagos-based division 3. Read together, the two moves are not a whim. They are the scaffolding of an acquisition desk — an African-owned one — pointed at the same asset the rest of the industry has spent five years chasing. emPawa has framed the push explicitly around keeping African intellectual property in African hands and positioning itself as a serious player in the continent's music economy 1. The question this raises is not whether Afrobeats and amapiano are valuable. Globally, they plainly are. It is who gets to own the part that keeps paying long after the record is made.
What emPawa is actually offering
A catalogue is not one thing. A song generates two broadly separate income streams: the master recording (the specific recorded track, historically owned by labels) and the publishing (the underlying composition — melody and lyrics — owned by songwriters and their publishers). emPawa's language has been deliberately broad; it is inviting owners of African "music catalogue" generally. But the simultaneous hire of a publishing chief, and Williams's background in publishing A&R, signals that composition rights are central to the plan 3. Publishing is the smarter target for a thinly resourced buyer: it is more durable, less capital-intensive than financing recordings, and travels further through sync and cover versions. Just as important is the phrase "sell a piece" 2. emPawa is not only offering to buy catalogues outright; it is offering to buy stakes, which lets an artist raise cash today while retaining some ownership and future upside. That structure — partial, revenue-share-backed — is the one Western royalty platforms pioneered, now offered by a principal who is himself an Afrobeats artist.
How a catalogue gets priced
The arithmetic is unsentimental. Buyers annualise a catalogue's recent royalty income and apply a multiple that reflects how durable, diversified and "evergreen" the earnings look. In 2025 the valuation firm Citrin Cooperman priced 566 catalogues worth nearly $13 billion combined, up from $10.7 billion a year earlier; catalogues combining masters and publishing traded above a 17x multiple, pure publishing around 15x, while younger, less-proven masters averaged closer to 13.7x 7. This is why emPawa's three-year earnings requirement matters: without a settled income history, there is nothing to annualise and no credible multiple to apply 2. It also exposes the seller's dilemma. A multiple is a lump sum paid now in exchange for a stream the buyer expects to keep growing. For a catalogue riding Afrobeats' and amapiano's steep adoption curve, the years the buyer harvests after the sale may be worth far more than the cheque — which is precisely the bet the buyer is making and the seller is giving up.
The boom emPawa is arriving late to
The global catalogue trade is enormous and well-capitalised. Music M&A exceeded $8 billion in aggregate value in 2024 — the highest of the streaming era — and catalogue companies raised more than $4 billion in the first quarter of 2025 alone, a war chest of "dry powder" waiting to be deployed 9. Blackstone bought the Hipgnosis Songs Fund for roughly $1.6 billion in 2024; that 45,000-song catalogue was subsequently valued at $2.36 billion 8. Into this field emPawa arrives as a comparatively tiny principal: Mr Eazi's best-known financing vehicle, the Africa Music Fund, launched in 2020 at $20 million 12. The asymmetry is the whole story. A single mid-size Western catalogue deal now averages around $23 million 7 — larger than the fund Mr Eazi built to seed an entire continent's emerging artists.
The lens: owned by, or harvested from
Here the ownership-and-value-capture lens — our interpretive frame, not a verdict — becomes useful. The majors have already moved on African infrastructure. Universal Music Group bought a majority of Lagos label Mavin Global in February 2024, in a deal reported (terms were never disclosed) to value Mavin as high as roughly $150 million 45. Warner Music completed its full acquisition of the African distributor Africori — representing more than 7,000 artists — in February 2025, having first invested back in 2020 6. The pattern is consistent: authorship stays in Africa; the equity that compounds off it increasingly does not. emPawa's bid is the first serious attempt to run that process in reverse — to have an African principal own the machine rather than feed it 1. Catalogue consolidation is, in the end, an ownership contest fought with balance sheets: whoever can pay the multiple and wait out the royalty tail keeps the compounding income. Whether emPawa succeeds turns on two opposing readings, each of which deserves its strongest form.
Branch A: the African-owned machine
In the optimistic reading, emPawa is building exactly the institution the continent lacks: a domestic buyer that keeps publishing value home. Every stake it acquires is a royalty stream that pays an African-owned company rather than a London or New York fund, and a precedent that an artist can sell liquidity without surrendering the asset offshore. The timing is defensible. Nigerian artists earned around ₦58 billion — roughly $38 million — in Spotify royalties in 2024, more than double the prior year 10; amapiano contributed an estimated $120 million to South Africa's music economy over the same period 11. (Part of the naira jump reflects the currency's depreciation rather than pure growth, but the dollar value still rose sharply.) These are young, fast-growing catalogues whose multiples sit below the premium Western evergreens — which is to say, relatively cheap to acquire now. A founder-owned, operator-led buyer who understands the culture, with Williams's acquisition experience behind the desk 3, could compound that upside at home. In this branch emPawa is a founder-owned counter-model, proof that the value of African music need not leave the continent to be monetised.
Branch B: the under-capitalised feeder
The sceptical reading is just as coherent. A buyer competing against funds with billions in committed capital 9 cannot win on price, and sellers — rationally — take the highest bid. emPawa could end up acquiring only what the majors decline or, worse, become a feeder: aggregating African catalogues cheaply, proving the income, then flipping them to a Western fund or major for a markup — an intermediary in the very extraction it set out to reverse. The catalogue math may not favour the African seller either. An artist who sells three years in, before a song's international long tail, hands the compounding to the buyer; emPawa's upside in Branch A is, definitionally, upside taken from the artist. And a thinly capitalised acquirer carries its own risk: Hipgnosis itself showed how quickly aggressive multiples can be written down when the market turns 8. Capitalisation, not intention, decides which branch emPawa lands in.
The question that stays open
Both things can be true at once. emPawa's call is the most concrete African-owned answer yet to a decade of offshore consolidation — and it is being made with a fraction of the capital arrayed on the other side. The deals it can actually win will reveal which story is real: whether it accumulates a durable, home-owned catalogue, or becomes a well-intentioned on-ramp to the funds it was meant to resist. The metric worth watching is not how many catalogues emPawa buys, but whether the royalty streams it acquires are still African-owned in five years — or have simply changed hands on the way out. Who, in the end, will own Afrobeats' back catalogue: the people who made it, or the capital that can afford to wait?