Asake announced his fourth studio album, MNEY, is his first full album under Giran Republic, the imprint he set up after quietly leaving Olamide’s YBNL in early 2025. Distribution sits with EMPIRE, a San Francisco-based independent that’s moved its catalog since 2022. Ownership of the label is finally Nigerian. Ownership of the pipes is not.
What Does an Artist-Owned Imprint Actually Do for the Nigerian Music Business?
It keeps the master upside inside the artist’s own company, which is the same fight 960 Music’s lawyers are running in Port Harcourt this month over Burna Boy’s L.I.F.E and Redemption masters. Setting up Giran Republic means Asake’s next decade of catalogue value feeds into a vehicle he controls. That’s a real structural win. It doesn’t move the distribution layer. Streams, royalty accounting, licensing, sync placements, global marketing, all of it still routes through EMPIRE’s servers in California. Sub-Saharan recorded music revenues hit $120 million in 2025, per the IFPI. The accounting that turns those streams into dollars happens elsewhere, and so does the financialisation layer now pricing Afrobeats wins on US exchanges.
What We Think
The M$NEY cover tells the story better than any label announcement. Asake is Nigerian. The neo-Fuji sound is Lagos. The marble is Italian. The sculptor is Iraqi-Dutch. The distributor is American. The bust of the Afrobeats star is being carved by a foreign hand in a foreign studio from foreign stone. That’s an honest rendering of where Afrobeats sits in 2026. An imprint solves the Olamide problem. It doesn’t solve the EMPIRE problem, the bigger one, and the same one showing up when skit-makers hit the chart ahead of musicians, or when streamers pull 389,000 concurrent viewers without a label. The open question is whether Nigerian capital will ever sit on the other side of a distribution deal.
