The title of the song is doing more than one thing at once.

"Not Letting Go" is a heartfelt and soulful ballad touching on love, commitment, perseverance, and attachment. Kworb

That is the surface reading. The love song version. The one that works on radio and makes people save it to their late-night playlists.

But there is another reading sitting underneath it that every artist who has ever had to choose between security and ownership will feel the moment they know the full story behind it.

Bensoul was the first artist ever signed to Sol Generation Records, the label established by Sauti Sol in 2018. His five-year deal ended in 2023. He left. He started his own record label, Lion of Sudah, and released his debut album under it the same year. OkayAfrica

Not Letting Go dropped on February 5, 2026, under Sudah Nation, his label, his terms, his masters.

It is currently number one in Kenya.

Not letting go of what you built when everyone expected you to stay comfortable. That is the other song underneath the song.

Where It Started

Benson Mutua was born March 4, 1996, and raised in Dallas, a slum in Embu, Kenya. His father, a musician who played bass and electric guitar, influenced Bensoul's interest in music from early childhood. OkayAfrica

That detail matters more than it might appear to on first read.

A father who plays bass and guitar in a slum in Embu is not giving his son a music industry contact list. He is giving him something more durable. He is giving him the understanding that music is something you do because it is inside you, not because the conditions around you make it easy or logical or financially sensible.

Bensoul grew up watching someone make music without infrastructure. Without a label. Without a manager. Without a pathway that anyone could point to and say: follow this, it leads somewhere good.

He watched someone play because playing was the thing.

That lesson took root deeply enough that when the biggest opportunity in Kenyan music came knocking, he took it, built on it, and then did the thing that very few artists in East Africa have done with that kind of momentum behind them.

He walked away from it.

What Sol Generation Actually Meant

To understand what Bensoul gave up, you have to understand what Sol Generation was in 2018.

Sol Generation is the record label established by Sauti Sol, Kenya's most celebrated music group, whose reach across East Africa and beyond made it the most credible artist-run label in the region's history. OkayAfrica

Being the first artist signed to that label was not just a deal. It was an endorsement from the most respected creative institution Kenyan music had produced. It was immediate credibility, immediate distribution infrastructure, immediate access to a network that had taken Sauti Sol a decade to build.

Bensoul built his career on soulful Afro-R&B and pop, becoming a standout voice in modern East African music, with his early releases under Sol Generation establishing him as one of Kenya's most promising artists. Spotify

"Lucy" became the record that introduced Bensoul to Kenya at scale. The collaborations followed, with Sauti Sol, with Mejja on "Nairobi," with Khaligraph Jones, with artists across the East African spectrum. The five years under Sol Generation built something that looked, from the outside, like a perfectly functioning music career.

Which is exactly what makes what happened next so significant.

The Decision

In 2023, Bensoul announced he was leaving Sol Generation following the end of his five-year contract. He announced the development of his own record label, Lion of Sudah. OkayAfrica

No drama. No public dispute. No industry gossip that leaked and forced a statement. He simply served his contract, honored everything he had agreed to, and then chose himself.

That sentence does not carry enough weight when it is read quickly. Let it sit for a moment.

He was thirty years old. He had spent his entire professional career inside the infrastructure of someone else's label. His audience knew him within that context. His distribution, his marketing, his legal protections had all run through a system that was not his to control.

Walking away from that in 2023 meant walking into a version of the music industry where every single decision landed on his desk directly. Every licensing negotiation. Every distribution agreement. Every beat he recorded over had to be managed under his own label structure because there was no longer anyone else to absorb that complexity.

He named the label Lion of Sudah.

He named himself.

What He Built on the Other Side

"Not Letting Go" was released February 5, 2026, under Sudah Nation, produced and composed by Benson Mutua himself, with Hendrick Sam handling the mix and master. YouTube

Bensoul wrote it. Bensoul owns it. Bensoul released it through his own infrastructure. Every stream that "Not Letting Go" accumulates in Kenya, in Tanzania, in Uganda, in the diaspora searching for the East African sound they grew up with, flows back to an artist who controls his own catalogue completely.

As of May 11, 2026, "Not Letting Go" leads Kenya's top songs released this year, sitting at the top of the Wakilisha Kenya chart, the most comprehensive tracking of domestic Kenyan music performance. The NATIVE

Number one in Kenya. Under his own label. Three years after walking away from the most powerful label in the country.

The gamble paid off because it was never really a gamble. It was a man who grew up watching his father play music in Embu without infrastructure, making the calculated decision that infrastructure in someone else's name was always going to have a ceiling.

His own name had no ceiling.

The Part of This Story That Belongs to You

The Bensoul story gets told as inspiration and it deserves to be told that way. The slum in Embu. The label first signee. The exit. The self-built label. The number one record.

But inspiration without a practical lesson is just a feeling that fades by Thursday.

The practical lesson inside "Not Letting Go" is this: ownership of your music does not begin when you decide to start a label. It begins with the first record you make and the decisions you make about how that record is built.

An artist who records over a free beat with no licence documentation does not own the record they made. They own the vocal performance and nothing else. The moment that beat's producer changes their mind, registers the instrumental, or simply realises their track is accumulating streams on someone else's release, the ownership conversation becomes a legal conversation that the artist without documentation will lose.

Bensoul left Sol Generation with clean documentation on everything he had made under that deal because he had entered a proper contractual structure on day one. That paper trail was what made the exit clean, what made Sudah Nation viable from the first day, what made it possible for "Not Letting Go" to land at number one under a label that was three years old.

Clean paper from the beginning. That is the foundation.

At mBeatz, every beat in the catalogue comes with instant delivery of full WAV files and a proper licence document. Not a screenshot of a YouTube comment. Not a verbal agreement in a WhatsApp group. A document. The kind of document that makes everything Bensoul built possible to replicate from day one, regardless of where you are starting from.

The music you make tonight is either going to be yours or it is going to be complicated. The beat you choose is where that decision gets made.

Start clean. Browse the mBeatz catalogue and own your music from the first bar.

Did the Bensoul move inspire you? Tell us in the comments what building your own music path looks like for you.