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Attorneys for Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge fired back at a lawsuit that claims he and the label “aided and abetted” Sean “Diddy” Combs in his alleged sexual abuse, saying the accusations are so “offensively false” that they plan to seek legal penalties against the lawyer who filed them.
In a motion to dismiss all claims against UMG and Grainge, the label’s lawyers blasted attorney Tyrone Blackburn for filing “knowingly false allegations” of criminal wrongdoing “without the slightest factual or legal basis.” They said they would seek so-called sanctions against him in a future filing.
“A license to practice law is a privilege,” wrote Donald Zakarin, a longtime music industry litigator who represents UMG and Grainge. “Mr. Blackburn, plaintiff’s lawyer, has misused that license to self-promote, gratuitously, falsely and recklessly accusing the UMG defendants of criminal behavior.”
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The Wednesday filing came in response to a lawsuit filed last month by a producer named Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, who says the rapper sexually assaulted and harassed him. The lawsuit is one of several abuse cases filed against Combs, in addition to an apparent federal criminal investigation that led to raids of his homes this week. Combs has strongly denied all allegations of wrongdoing.
But the case filed by Jones went far beyond a simple assault claim, arguing that Diddy, Grainge and many others had also violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act – the federal RICO statute that’s more often used in criminal cases against mobsters and drug cartels. He also accused the various defendants of violating federal sex trafficking laws.
In Wednesday’s filing, UMG’s lawyers said those claims were “entirely invented by Mr. Blackburn.”
“The [complaint] hurls accusations of criminal racketeering and criminal sex trafficking against the UMG defendants, respected individuals and companies having utterly nothing to do with plaintiff’s claims,” Zakarin wrote Wednesday’s filings. “These accusations are recklessly false and, but for the fact that they are embodied in a complaint, would be libelous.”
In addition to the original allegations, UMG’s lawyers also sharply criticized Blackburn for filing a second, updated complaint this week – a filing that they claim drastically altered the allegations. In his filing, Zakarin called it the worst lawyering he had seen in nearly 50 years as an attorney.
“In all that time, I have never seen any attorney display anything remotely like the utter indifference shown by Mr. Blackburn towards his obligations as an attorney,” Zakarin wrote. “I have never seen any lawyer, in any pleading, in any court, accuse people and companies of criminal conduct without the slightest basis and then try to file an amended pleading completely jettisoning every allegation underpinning the original claims and substituting completely different and irreconcilable allegations to support the very same claims.”
In a letter to the judge Thursday, he called the UMG motion a “public relations stunt” that had been filed in bad faith. “They did not have any issues marrying themselves to Mr. Combs when it was popular. Now, suddenly … they are treating Mr. Combs like he has the plague,” Blackburn wrote in the letter.
In a statement to Billboard on Thursday, Blackburn said: “UMG should produce their financial records. Let’s see what the money was used for. Stop trying to escape liability.”
A spokesman for UMG did not immediately return a request for comment on the motion.

In November, I quit my job in generative AI to campaign for creators’ right not to have their work used for AI training without permission. I started Fairly Trained, a non-profit that certifies generative AI companies that obtain a license before training models on copyrighted works.
Mostly, I’ve felt good about this decision — but there have been a few times when I’ve questioned it. Like when a big media company, though keen to defend its own rights, told me it couldn’t find a way to stop using unfairly-trained generative AI in other domains. Or whenever demos from the latest models receive unquestioning praise despite how they’re trained. Or, last week, with the publication of a series of articles about AI music company Suno that I think downplay serious questions about the training data it uses.
Suno is an AI music generation company with impressive text-to-song capabilities. I have nothing against Suno, with one exception: Piecing together various clues, it seems likely that its model is trained on copyrighted work without rights holders’ consent.
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What are these clues? Suno refuses to reveal its training data sources. In an interview with Rolling Stone, one of its investors disclosed that Suno didn’t have deals with the labels “when the company got started” (there is no indication this has changed), that they invested in the company “with the full knowledge that music labels and publishers could sue,” and that the founders’ lack of open hostility to the music industry “doesn’t mean we’re not going to get sued.” And, though I’ve approached the company through two channels about getting certified as Fairly Trained, they’ve so far not taken me up on the offer, in contrast to the 12 other AI music companies we’ve certified for training their platforms fairly.
There is, of course, a chance that Suno licenses its training data, and I genuinely hope I’m wrong. If they correct the record, I’ll be the first to loudly and regularly trumpet the company’s fair training credentials.
But I’d like to see media coverage of companies like Suno give more weight to the question of what training data is being used. This is an existential issue for creators.
Editor’s note: Suno’s founders did not respond to requests for comment from Billboard about their training practices. Sources confirm that the company does not have licensing agreements in place with some of the most prominent music rightsholders, including the three major label groups and the National Music Publishers’ Association.
Limiting discussion of Suno’s training data to the fact that it “decline[s] to reveal details” and not explicitly stating the possibility that Suno uses copyrighted music without permission means that readers may not be aware of the potential for unfair exploitation of musicians’ work by AI music companies. This should factor into our thoughts about which AI music companies to support.
If Suno is training on copyrighted music without permission, this is likely the technological factor that sets it apart from other AI music products. The Rolling Stone article mentions some of the tough technical problems that Suno is solving — having to do with tokens, the sampling rate of audio and more — but these are problems that other companies have solved. In fact, several competitors have models as capable as Suno’s. The reason you don’t see more models like Suno’s being released to the public is that most AI music companies want to ensure training data is licensed before they release their products.
The context here is important. Some of the biggest generative AI companies in the world are using untold numbers of creators’ work without permission in order to train AI models that compete with those creators. There is, understandably, a big public outcry at this large-scale scraping of copyrighted work from the creative community. This has led to a number of lawsuits, which Rolling Stone mentions.
The fact that generative AI competes with human creators is something AI companies prefer not to talk about. But it’s undeniable. People are already listening to music from companies like Suno in place of Spotify, and generative AI listening will inevitably eat into music industry revenues — and therefore human musicians’ income — if training data isn’t licensed.
Generative AI is a powerful technology that will likely bring a number of benefits. But if we support the exploitation of people’s work for training without permission, we implicitly support the unfair destruction of the creative industries. We must instead support companies that take a fairer approach to training data.
And those companies do exist. There are a number — generally startups — taking a fairer approach, refusing to use copyrighted work without consent. They are licensing, or using public domain data, or commissioning data, or all of the above. In short, they are working hard not to train unethically. At Fairly Trained, we have certified 12 of these companies in AI music. If you want to use AI music and you care about creators’ rights, you have options.
There is a chance Suno has licensed its data. I encourage the company to disclose what it’s training its AI model on. Until we know more, I hope anyone looking to use AI music will opt instead to work with companies that we know take a fair approach to using creators’ work.
To put it simply — and to use some details pulled from Suno’s Rolling Stone interview — it doesn’t matter whether you’re a team of musicians, what you profess to think about IP, or how many pictures of famous composers you have on the walls. If you train on copyrighted work without a license, you’re not on the side of musicians. You’re unfairly exploiting their work to build something that competes with them. You’re taking from them to your gain — and their cost.
Ed Newton-Rex is the CEO of Fairly Trained and a composer. He previously founded Jukedeck, one of the first AI music companies, ran product in Europe for TikTok, and was vp of audio at Stability AI.
Concord has named veteran label executive Stephanie Hudacek president of its Rounder Records, the company announced Thursday (March 28). Hudacek, who founded and has served as president of distributor and label Soundly Music since 2017, takes over the label that is home to the likes of Billy Strings, Ruston Kelly, Sierra Farrell and Katie Pruittand has recently released posthumous albums from Gregg Allman and Dr. John.
Established in 1970 in Nashville, Rounder has been the home of artists like George Thorogood, Alison Krauss and Béla Fleck through the years, racking up 54 Grammy Awards along the way. Acquired by Concord in 2010, it’s one of eight standalone labels under the Concord Label Group umbrella, alongside Fantasy, Fearless, Loma Vista, PULSE, Easy Eye Sound, Concord Records and Concord Jazz.
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Stephanie Hudacek
“Throughout her career, Stephanie has shown a deep commitment to artists and songwriters as well as an incredible intuition for what it takes to bring their music to the world,” said Concord Label Group CEO Tom Becci, who took over the top job last August, in a statement. “She has the requisite skills to preserve the label’s distinct history while ensuring her artists and team have the resources necessary for continued success in an evolving environment.”
Prior to launching Soundly Music, where she worked with artists such as Maggie Rose and Pony Bradshaw, Hudacek was GM of Riser House Records in Nashville, working in the country and Americana realms. Before that, she was an artist and tour manager, working with the likes of Joan Baez and Darrell Scott. For the past two years, Hudacek also doubled as president of Late August Records.
“It is an unbelievable honor to be able to lead Rounder Records,” Hudacek said in a statement. “Throughout its history, Rounder has shown an uncompromising devotion to great, authentic artistry, which has made it a natural home for artists seeking the same. That is a tradition I am thrilled to carry on.”
Travis Scott is asking to be dismissed from the sprawling litigation over the 2021 disaster at the Astroworld music festival, arguing that safety and security at live events is “not the job of performing artists.”
More than 2,500 people have sued over Astroworld, which left 10 dead and hundreds injured after a crowd crush during Scott’s Nov. 5 show. They claim Scott (real name Jacques Bermon Webster II), Live Nation and other organizers were legally negligent in how they planned the event, and are collectively seeking billions in damages.
But in a motion filed Monday in Houston court, Scott’s attorneys (led by prominent litigator Daniel Petrocelli) argue that the rapper himself cannot be held liable for the tragic incident. Even though the event was promoted under Scott’s name and branding, his lawyers say that he was merely an onstage performer who is not responsible for ensuring audience safety.
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“Like any other adrenaline-inducing diversion, music festivals must balance exhilaration with safety and security—but that balance is not the job of performing artists, even those involved in promoting and marketing performances,” Petrocelli wrote. “Which only makes sense: Performing artists, even those who engage in certain promotional activities, have no inherent expertise or specialized knowledge in concert safety measures, venue security protocols, or site-design.”
And even if Scott could be theoretically held liable because of his involvement as a promotor, his lawyers say the evidence shows that he did enough to avoid any claims of negligence or other wrongdoing – arguing that he “acted diligently to protect against every reasonably apprehensible danger.”
“When, during festival planning, concerns arose about the risk of a stampede occurring in the festival site, the Scott defendants supported festival organizers’ efforts to eliminate that risk by agreeing to remove certain rides and other attractions at the site,” Petrocelli writes. “Then, when the Scott defendants were told to end the show after Mr. Scott’s guest performer finished performing, they did just that—ending the show as directed.”
The lawsuits over Astroworld, combined into one single large action in Texas state court in Houston, have spent much of the last two years in discovery, as the two sides exchange information and take depositions of key figures. Scott was deposed in October, facing questioning from plaintiffs attorneys for roughly eight hours, according to the Associated Press.
The first trial in the massive litigation is currently scheduled to start on May 6, according to court records.
With that trial date looming, many of the defendants named in the case are currently asking to be dismissed from the litigation. Earlier this month, a similar request was filed by Drake (Aubrey Graham), who was named in many of the lawsuits because he appeared on stage as a guest performer during Scott’s deadly show.
“Mr. Graham did not receive any security briefings, was not informed of any crowd control issues, injuries or deaths in the crowd, or any stop show orders at any time either before or during his 14-minute performance,” Drake’s lawyers wrote at the time.
In his motion on Monday, Scott makes similar arguments. He says that his involvement in planning was limited to “creative control” and marketing, and that he and his team were “neither responsible for nor involved in the approval of venue security, safety, or site layout decisions.”
“No one disputes that tragedy struck the Astroworld Festival,” Petrocelli wrote. “But promoting and performing at a concert do not equate to the power to control a crowd or to design a venue safely. Basic tort principles prevent imposing liability on the Scott defendants for a tragedy arising from forces legally controlled by others.”
Madonna’s historic concert at Rio’s Copacabana Beach on May 4 will be produced by her long-time promoter Arthur Fogel and legendary Brazilian producer and promoter Luiz Oscar Niemeyer, Live Nation officials have confirmed to Billboard. Fogel is one of the most accomplished concert and tour producers in the world and serves as the chairman of […]
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Back in the 1980s and even the 1990s, Spanish artists like Raphael, Julio Iglesias and Camilo Sesto were hugely popular both in Latin America and among U.S. Latin audiences — a situation replicated in the 1990s and 2000s by the likes of global superstars like Mecano and Alejandro Sanz, both of whom hailed from Spain. […]

The Brooklyn Paramount, Live Nation‘s new 2,700-capacity venue in downtown Brooklyn, opens its doors Wednesday (March 27) with its first show: A headlining performance by Damian and Stephen Marley.
The concert kicks off an inaugural season at the venue that will bring artists including PinkPantheress, Oneohtrix Point Never, Waxahatchee, Norah Jones and Sting to its stage in the coming months.
For Live Nation, Brooklyn Paramount fills a gap in the New York market between the promoter’s two 1,100-capacity clubs, Manhattan’s Irving Plaza and Brooklyn’s Warsaw, and its 3,500-capacity outdoor venue, The Rooftop at Pier 17.
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“It was my journey for the last 10 years, finding this exact capacity within our pipeline of venues in New York City, because it was the one that we were missing,” says Stacie George, senior vp of Live Nation Northeast. “Now we have a home for artists in between those two stages [of development].”
The Brooklyn Paramount concourse.
Evan Joseph
The addition of Brooklyn Paramount to Live Nation’s portfolio allows the promoter to better compete with AEG and its regional affiliate The Bowery Presents, which operates three venues across the city — Webster Hall, Brooklyn Steel and Terminal 5 — that range in capacity from 1,500 to 3,000, as well as Madison Square Garden Entertainment’s Beacon Theatre (2,900 capacity). And, taken in conjunction with Live Nation’s Manhattan clubs Mercury Lounge and Bowery Ballroom, which hold about 250 and 600, respectively, Brooklyn Paramount now creates a clear path for an artist in Live Nation’s ecosystem from small rooms all the way up to the 5,000-capacity Central Park Summerstage, with which the promoter inked an exclusive booking partnership in late 2022.
“We want an artist, manager, agent to feel that we invest in their artist all the way from the beginning,” George says. “We want to grow with your artists and continue to give them amazing venues to play at. Your hope is always that you retain that relationship and that history.”
That doesn’t only apply to artists “on their way up” to the arena level but “on their way down”: “We want to be with them across their full journey and long musical career,” George says.
Brooklyn Paramount’s concert space from the back of its floor.
Evan Joseph
Brooklyn Paramount’s new chapter is just the latest in its rich, nearly century-long history. First opened in 1928, the venue hosted seminal artists including Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Buddy Holly throughout the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Long Island University (LIU) purchased the space in 1954 and, shortly after, converted it to a gymnasium. Nearly a decade ago, LIU began working to renovate the dormant theater; the venue’s re-opening is the culmination of a five-year planning, design and construction process by Live Nation.
For George, one of Brooklyn Paramount’s strongest assets is its location, which is immediately accessible by several subway lines and the Long Island Rail Road. And she expects the venue’s fusion of old Brooklyn history — its Rococo ceiling is among the many design details the renovation preserved — and modern amenities to attract fans and artists alike. For the former, the venue offers multiple high-end cocktail bars and a VIP balcony and lounge (Ella’s, taking its name from Fitzgerald). For the latter, Brooklyn Paramount provides spacious artist accommodations with showers, a workout space and even a game room with Pac-Man and a pinball machine.
From a production standpoint, the theater has parking space for three buses. “In New York, that’s a luxury,” George says with a laugh. “Half the time the buses have to drive to, like, New Jersey to park at a Walmart, because they can’t park in front of the venue.”
Ella’s VIP lounge at Brooklyn Paramount.
Evan Joseph
In terms of booking, Brooklyn Paramount plans to continue to program a spectrum of genres in keeping with its initial calendar and to satisfy the diverse clientele it’s courting. While the venue was designed primarily as an all-general-admission space, some shows, like the multi-night runs by Jones and Sting, will be seated. Brooklyn Paramount has already announced more than 60 shows through October, and George says it has locked in an additional 50 that have yet to be unveiled.
Several hundred guests received a first look at the venue — “this beautiful masterpiece,” as George puts it — on Tuesday night at its re-opening preview party, with live music including a DJ set by St. Vincent in Ella’s. “Seeing people walk in and just have that ‘wow’ moment — that’s exciting,” George says.
A rapper popular on TikTok must pay Sony Music more than $800,000 in damages for using a copyrighted sample without permission, a federal judge ruled Wednesday (March 27), saying that the big fine would teach him a six-figure “lesson” about “carefully selecting the materials included in his raps.”
Sony sued Trefuego (real name Dantreal Daevon Clark-Rainbolt) in 2021, accusing him of using a “blatant” sample from a 1986 Japanese instrumental song in his “90mh” — a track that Sony claimed had been featured in 155,000 TikTok videos and streamed 100 million times on Spotify.
After struggling to locate him, a federal judge ruled last year that the 20-year-old rapper had, in fact, infringed Sony’s copyrights. And in a follow-up ruling Wednesday, that same judge ordered him to hand over a whopping $802,997 — covering roughly $700,000 he earned in profits from Spotify and other platforms, and approximately $100,000 he would pay Sony in licensing fees.
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“The court hopes this case will serve as a $802,997.23 lesson for defendant in carefully selecting the materials included in his raps,” U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman wrote in his decision.
The judge also ordered Trefuego to pay ongoing royalties, including a 50% cut of publishing revenue and a 20% cut of recording revenue, and to repay $2,230 in legal costs incurred by Sony.
“Sony pursued a reasonable, non-frivolous claim to vindicate infringement of its copyrighted work,” Judge Pittman wrote. “Some may query the wisdom of pursuing a claim against a relatively small fish like Trefuego, but that fact does not render Sony’s motivation improper or their lawsuit unreasonable.”
Sony has been chasing Trefuego in some form since January 2021, when the company notified him that it believed “90mh” was built on an illegal sample of “Reflections,” a 1986 song by Japanese composer Toshifumi Hinata. After filing takedown requests in August 2022 to get the song pulled, Sony finally launched its lawsuit that December.
In its complaint, the label pointed out that Hinata’s song had seen a recent surge of popularity after an appearance in Netflix’s 2020 film Tigertail and placement on popular ambient music playlists on Spotify.
“Trefuego brazenly sought to ride the coattails of Hinata’s creativity and popularity without regard to the United States copyright laws or the rights of plaintiffs,” the label’s attorneys wrote at the time. “He used and copied plaintiffs’ work without so much as asking, or paying a cent to plaintiffs, and he continued to exploit that music despite plaintiffs’ demand that he stop.”
Sony’s lawsuit took a bizarre detour last year when Judge Pittman ruled that the label could forgo traditional methods of contacting Trefuego and instead simply send him direct messages on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Soundcloud. In doing so, the judge ruled that Sony had made “extensive efforts” and “gone to great lengths” to find Trefuego in real life, including “seven separate attempts” to serve him and hiring a private investigator.
In one particularly notable effort, Sony’s representatives apparently went “to his mother’s house on Mother’s Day in hopes that he would be there to celebrate with her” but still came up empty: “Sadly, he was not there, and his own mother claimed she did not know who he was,” the judge wrote.
With those procedural issues settled, Judge Pittman ruled on the case in November — and sided decisively with Sony. Though the judge noted that the case pitted “one of the largest international entertainment conglomerates on the planet” against “a twenty-year-old kid,” he ruled that the David-and-Goliath posture would not protect Trefuego from liability.
“To quote ’90mh’, this case involves a young man who was ‘too focused on getting dough’ to understand the broader implications of purchasing a creative work without proof of originality or license-to-use,” the judge wrote in his November decision. “To quote ‘90mh’ again, Trefuego likely imagined Sony wouldn’t ‘really want smoke’ enough to prosecute this claim. But they did.”
Neither Trefuego nor a spokeswoman for Sony Music responded to requests for comment.
Ariana Grande is the latest singer-songwriter to get her own “Written By” playlist on Spotify. The playlist includes Grande’s biggest hits, including “7 Rings,” “Thank U Next,” “Dangerous Woman” and “we can’t be friends (wait for your love,)” as well as songs she has written for other artists. The playlist shines a light on Grande’s talents in […]