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Jay-Z’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, expects the rap mogul to be cleared of any wrongdoing in the coming days in the lawsuit filed earlier this month accusing him and Sean “Diddy” Combs of raping a 13-year-old girl at a 2000 MTV Video Music Awards afterparty.
Spiro hosted a press conference at Roc Nation’s headquarters in New York City on Monday afternoon (Dec. 16) where he defended his client’s innocence in the case while laying out a slideshow aiming to poke holes in the apparent inconsistencies of Jane Doe’s filing made by attorney Tony Buzbee.
Spiro chose not to unmask the now 38-year-old woman from Alabama who filed the complaint but chose to sharply criticize her case and her attorney. “This is not for truth and justice,” Spiro said. “This is for money.”
He continued: “When something isn’t real, when something doesn’t happen, you’re going to get the details wrong because you weren’t really there. [It’s] not possible. It’s because this never happened.”
According to her complaint earlier this month, the accuser got a ride from Rochester, N.Y. to New York City as a 13-year-old in 2000 to attend the MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall, where she remained outside and later came into contact with Diddy’s limousine driver.
Doe claims she was taken to a “large white residence” about 20 minutes from the award show venue where she was served a drink and then repeatedly sexually assaulted by Diddy and Jay-Z (born Shawn Carter) while another unnamed celebrity watched the rape take place. She says she then escaped the afterparty and made it to a gas station where she allegedly called her father to pick her up.
Jay-Z’s lawyer Alex Spiro hosted a press conference vehemently defending his client against the rape allegations made in the lawsuit. “It’s because this never happened,” he repeated. pic.twitter.com/XHfONUIMcd— LordTreeSa🅿️ (@LordTreeSap) December 17, 2024
But in an interview with NBC News on Friday, the accuser admitted to multiple inconsistencies in her story. And in the same story, her father admitted he can’t recall picking up his daughter following the alleged traumatic events 24 years ago. “I feel like I would remember that, and I don’t,” he said. “I have a lot going on, but I mean, that’s something that would definitely stick in my mind.”
At Monday’s event, Spiro focused on those seeming shortcomings in the story: “[Jane Doe] said she’s at the party alone, this 13-year-old girl, and she finds herself in the room with the three most famous people at the party — just think about how unnatural, how little common sense that makes. And according to her, one of the witnesses is a female celebrity who’s just standing there watching the repetitive rape of a child,” Spiro added. “There’s an adult female in the room watching the rape of a child. Afterward, she says she runs out of the house naked — none of them notice that? None of them pay any notice? For 24 years, none of them has said anything?”
While Jay-Z is named alongside Diddy, who will remain behind bars until his trial in May, Spiro attempted to distance Hov from the embattled Bad Boy CEO.
“Mr. Carter has nothing to do with Mr. Combs’ case or Mr. Combs,” he stated. “They knew each other professionally for a number of years. Just like in all professions, people know each other. At music awards, they support each other. They go to the NBA All-Star Game, they support each other. That’s just how professions work. There is no closer association between any of them — that’s also a matter of fiction.”
According to Spiro, Jay is “upset” about what he views as a baseless lawsuit. “He’s upset that somebody would be allowed to do this, would be allowed to make a mockery of the system like this,” he continued. “He’s upset that this distracts and dissuades real victims from coming forward. He’s upset that his kids and family have to deal with this. And he should be upset.”
In an earlier response statement, Jay-Z denied the allegations against him and called Buzbee a “deplorable human.” At Monday’s event, Spiro hinted at further legal action being taken against Buzbee, who he said “will be dealt with” separately following the lawsuit.
In an exclusive statement to Billboard on Tuesday (Dec. 17), Buzbee claimed that “Mr. Spiro has a history of making threats against opposing lawyers.”
Buzzbee continued: “We won’t be intimidated and will raise his conduct with the relevant entities. As for us, we will continue to conduct ourselves professionally. The only reason this dispute is in the public sphere is that Mr. Spiro filed a frivolous case against my firm and claimed extortion with absolutely no support for such an outlandish claim. We will file the appropriate paperwork in due course.”
To achieve the bright sound in his famous 1965 solo for The Who‘s “My Generation,” John Entwistle bought a cheap Danelectro bass, removed the strings designed by John D’Addario Sr., and transferred them to his Fender. The plan worked until one of the strings broke — and Entwistle had to buy two more Danelectros just for the strings.
Jim D’Addario, who built a multimillion-dollar guitar-strings empire on the foundation of his late father John’s early innovations, tells this story in a 50th-anniversary video series called Jim’s Corner. D’Addario, which sells drumheads, saxophone reeds, pedalboards, earplugs and other musicians’ gear in addition to its signature guitar strings at 3,300 retail outlets, earned $220 million in global revenue last year and employs 1,100 people, has taken a corporate victory lap throughout, combining history with “When You Know You Know” ads starring younger players like Chris Stapleton, Herman Li of DragonForce and Yvette Young of Covet.
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“Most people are very apathetic about their strings, and they usually listen to their teacher, or an artist that’s endorsing the product, to get them to try our strings,” says D’Addario, now chairman of the board of the company he named after his family in 1974. “The ones that know really know ours are better — and consistent.”
In addition to the video series, the company that started with teenaged Jim accompanying his guitar-playing father to music-business trade conventions in the ’60s launched a beer, Eddie Ate Dynamite (GoodBye Eddie), in early December; held a beer-launch party at the time starring a member of the Infamous Stringdusters; and spent much of 2024 releasing limited-edition merch and packages of strings in retro containers.
D’Addario acknowledges the company faces industry headwinds — the musical-instrument business, he says, is declining 2%-3% per year, which affects a company whose guitar strings make up 45% of its business. “People buy a guitar for their kid, and if he doesn’t play, they don’t put it in the attic or the basement anymore. They put it on eBay,” D’Addario says. “Everything a dealer sells, he’s going to compete with that instrument. That has had a very serious effect on the instruments bought at retail.”
But mostly, D’Addario is upbeat, describing the guitar pedalboards his company has spent two years designing, pedalboard power supplies containing USB batteries and coated strings that resist “moisture, perspiration, skin, debris.” Says D’Addario, “We keep an ideation list for each brand. We’ll have crazy things on there. When we have bandwidth, we’ll throw one on the active-project list.” Here, he discusses the company’s past and present in an hourlong Zoom from his home workshop in Farmingdale, N.Y.
What do you hope people learn about D’Addario from the 50th-anniversary campaign events?
It’s not the 50th anniversary of the family making strings, it’s the 50th anniversary of the brand name D’Addario. My dad and my grandfather were afraid to put their name on products. Italians would be discriminated against and it was a difficult name to pronounce. They felt like, in certain markets, it might not be accepted. In August of ’74, I said, “Nah, we’re going to get credit for making certain stuff, and our name’s going to be on it.”
Can you hear when a guitar player on the radio uses your strings?
No, that’s impossible. There are a lot of good strings out there that sound good. It’s very hard to discern that just from listening to it on the radio.
In the early 1990s, a package of strings had an envelope for each of the six strings — a paper envelope for each one, identified for each note, in a vinyl pouch with a fancy label. So there was a minimum of eight pieces of packaging; sometimes there was a little advertisement as well. My daughter Amy was in high school, and they were studying environmental friendliness and recycling and packaging, and I was changing my strings on the bed and I had all this garbage when I was done. She said, “You should really do something about that, that’s really criminal, you’re putting so much junk in the waste-stream just to change a set of strings.”
So it got me thinking. I came up with a system of color-coding the ball end on the string a different color, then coiling those together in one corrosion-resistant plastic bag and having them color-coded, so the silver one is this note and the brass one is this note. It eliminated 75% of the packaging. Since that time, we’ve saved billions of trees and millions of pounds of carbon not released into the atmosphere. That was one of the things that distinguished our strings. That’s one way we can tell onstage if our strings are being used. Otherwise, it’s very difficult. You can put branding on the package but when they’re playing on stage you can’t see it.
What music stars are your most loyal customers?
A lot of jazz guys, like Pat Metheny, who’s a good buddy, and Julian Loge. But there’s also a whole contingent of new people that I might not know. John McLaughlin, Blake Mills, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, Chris Thile of Nickel Creek, Sierra Ferrell, a mandolinist [who’s] going to be a superstar — those are the artists that really gravitate to our brand because they know they’re going to get the very best product.
How has the musical instrument market changed since you started?
It’s quite different. We also make drumheads and drumsticks and snare wires and guitar straps and cables. We make drumheads for acoustic drums and drumsticks and other accessories for drummers. The acoustic-drum market is 40-60% of what it was in 2004. Drums have been digitized. Instead of 20,000 drumheads a day, we’re only making 10,000. The other thing is the guitar was really the solo instrument, but it’s not anymore. You don’t hear a guitar solo in every hit; you hear repetitive rhythms and electronic sounds and synthesized sounds.
How much does this worry you?
We’ve seen this so many times — in the early ’90s, it was video games, and for three or four years, the guitar market didn’t have much growth. But then it came back. The acoustic guitar market was in the tank for the whole decade of the 1980s, and “MTV Unplugged” happened, then bingo, the acoustic guitar took off again. It always comes back.
What are your retirement plans, if any?
We don’t want to sell our business. Our family name is on the product. D’Addario strings are like the Titleist of golf balls, like Scotch Tape. When you walk into a music store, 40% to 50% of the strings on the wall are our brand, and that’s in almost every country around the world. I’d have trouble walking into a store and seeing my packaging screwed up or listening to people complaining about the quality.
Hugh Forrest has been promoted to president of South by Southwest, where he will continue to oversee programming and assume full leadership of an organization he’s worked at for 36 years. Previously co-president and chief programming officer, Forrest takes on this new role as Jann Baskett, the current co-president and chief brand officer, prepares to step down on Dec. 31. Baskett will transition into an advisory and project-based role.
As president, Forrest will focus on driving business growth and work closely with the board of directors, which includes co-founder Roland Swenson, Jay Penske (CEO of Penske Media, SXSW’s largest shareholder), and Amy Webb (CEO of the Future Today Institute). Forrest expressed his enthusiasm for leading SXSW into its next phase, emphasizing “the experience of connection, inspiration and discovery that we provide for so many different industries each March” and its role in fostering community globally.
Founded in 1987 by Swenson, Nick Barbaro, Louis Black and Louis Jay Meyers, SXSW has evolved into a globally renowned event in Austin. Swenson, who led SXSW for 36 years, became executive chairman in 2022. Over the past two years, Forrest and Baskett successfully navigated SXSW’s post-COVID recovery, including expanding the festival to Sydney and London.
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Baskett reflected on her time leading SXSW, sharing pride in her contributions alongside Forrest and the team. She praised the event’s mission of supporting creative individuals — “Never has that purpose been more necessary” — and expressed excitement about her ongoing involvement as an advisor. “SXSW continues to be a beacon of light for artists and change makers,” she said.
“I want to extend my gratitude to Jann Baskett for her leadership, commitment, and creative vision as Co-President of SXSW over the past few years,” said Jay Penske. “Her contributions have been key in evolving the festival. Looking ahead, we are confident that Hugh Forrest will continue SXSW’s long tradition of supporting innovators and artists, expanding our global footprint, and building upon the incredible foundation of the world’s premier gathering of creative minds.”
The Executive Leadership Team supporting Forrest includes co-founders Swenson and Barbaro, as well as chief culture & people officer Autumn Amescua, chief technology officer Justin Bankston, chief logistics officer Michele Flores, chiefpartnerships officer Peter Lewis, chief financial officer Leanna Rossman, general counsel Stevie Fitzgerald and executive vice president Darin Klein
Note: Billboard’s parent company PMC is the largest shareholder of SXSW and its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
Holiday music is a big business. It’s also a big source of litigation.
When Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” stormed back to the top of the Hot 100 this month, it wasn’t alone. Each of the current top five songs are holiday tracks, with Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” in second and Wham!’s “Last Christmas” coming in fourth.
All those streams make for some serious royalty money. Lee’s perennial classic earned nearly $4 million in 2022, and even lesser songs like “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” typically earn hundreds of thousands per year. In 2018, Billboard estimated that the entire Christmas music genre raked in $177 million in the U.S. market alone – a total that has almost certainly grown in the years since.
And where popularity and money go, lawsuits usually follow. As veteran music industry attorneys are fond of saying: “Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ”
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With the holidays right around the corner, Billboard is breaking down the many times that Christmas music has ended up in court – from Mariah’s ongoing copyright battle over “All I Want For Christmas Is You” to Darlene Love’s fights with streamers to repeated courtroom clashes over religious freedom. Here are the five big cases you need to know:
‘All I Want For Christmas Is’ … A Copyright Lawsuit
Carey’s 1994 blockbuster is THE modern holiday song – now re-taking the top spot on the Hot 100 for six straight years and earning a whopping $8.5 million in global revenue in 2022. So it’s no surprise that she’s facing a lawsuit seeking a cut of that cash.
Starting in 2022, Carey has faced copyright infringement allegations from songwriter named Vince Vance, who claims she stole key elements of “All I Want for Christmas is You” from his 1989 song of the same name. He claims that the earlier track, released by his Vince Vance and the Valiants, received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season — a year before Carey released her now-better-known hit.
“Carey has … palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,” Vance wrote in his latest complaint. “Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun.”
Unsurprisingly Carey’s lawyers see things differently. In a motion filed earlier this year seeking to end the case, her legal team argued that the two songs shared only generic similarities that are firmly in the public domain – including basic Christmas terminology and a simple message that’s been used in “legions of Christmas songs.”
“The claimed similarities are an unprotectable jumble of elements: a title and hook phrase used by many earlier Christmas songs, other commonplace words, phrases, and Christmas tropes like “Santa Claus” and “mistletoe,” and a few unprotectable pitches and chords randomly scattered throughout these completely different songs,” Carey’s attorneys wrote at the time.
With Christmas now looming, it looks like Vance might be getting a lump of coal in his stocking: At a hearing last month, the judge overseeing the lawsuit said she would likely side with Carey and dismiss the case.
Good Grief: ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ Sues Dollywood
Less than two months before Peanuts television producer Lee Mendelson passed away in 2019, his production company sued Dolly Parton’s Dollywood theme park – accusing the park of using the music from his “A Charlie Brown Christmas” without permission.
The songs of jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi’s legendary soundtrack to the 1965 television special, including classic originals as well as updated standards like “O Tannenbaum,” are firmly in the Christmas canon – and none more so than “Christmas Time Is Here,” which Guaraldi co-wrote with Mendelson.
In a lawsuit lodged in federal court, Lee Mendelson Film Productions Inc. accused Dollywood of using that song for decades in Christmas-themed theatrical production without proper licenses, calling it “willful copyright infringement” and “blatant disregard” of the law.
As is often the case in such lawsuits, Dollywood had secured a blanket license from BMI to publicly play millions of songs for its guests, but would have needed a separately-negotiated “dramatic license” to use it in a stage play: “Defendant knew from the beginning of its infringement that its performance license from BMI does not cover ‘grand’ or ‘dramatic’ rights,” the company wrote.
With a trial set to kick off in December 2021, both sides agreed to a confidential settlement that summer to resolve the case.
Concert Clash: Holiday Cheer or State Religion?
Do Christmas concerts at public schools violate the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state? It’s a question that’s been fought in court many times – and when a federal appellate judge weighed it in 2015, she didn’t miss the opportunity to sprinkle holiday references into her opinion.
For decades, Concord High School in Elkhart, Indiana held an annual winter concert centered on an “elaborate, student‐performed nativity scene,” featuring religious songs (including “Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head”) along with a narrator reading passages from the New Testament.
Unsurprisingly, after students and parents sued in 2014, a federal district court ruled that such an overtly Christian show violated the First Amendment and its ban on the establishment of a state religion. But when the school later made substantial changes — removing the bible readings and adding songs representing Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, among others — both the district judge and an appeals court said the new version of the show passed constitutional muster.
In her 2018 appellate opinion, Judge Diane Wood waxed poetic – saying that “since ancient times, people have been celebrating the winter solstice” and that the Concord High case put the court “in the uncomfortable role of Grinch.”
“But we accept this position, because we live in a society where all religions are welcome,” Judge Wood wrote. “The Christmas Spectacular program Concord actually presented in 2015 — a program in which cultural, pedagogical, and entertainment value took center stage — did not violate the Establishment Clause.”
Baby Please: Darlene Love Sues Over Her Voice
Before Mariah was the “Queen of Christmas,” that title was sometimes used for Darlene Love – and the original queen hasn’t been afraid to enforce her rights to her iconic holiday tracks “A Marshmallow World” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”
Back in 2016, attorneys for Love filed a lawsuit against Google over allegations that the tech giant used “Marshmallow” without permission in advertisements for its Nexus smartphones. A few months later, she filed a nearly-identical lawsuit against cable network HGTV, accusing the channel of using “Come Home” in another set of ads.
Darlene Love photographed on November 14, 2020 in Spring Valley, NY.
Mackenzie Stroh
Those might sound like copyright lawsuits, but they weren’t. Instead, Love accused the companies of violating her so-called right of publicity by using her voice in the commercial, claiming that her voice was so well known that using the songs falsely implied she had endorsed those products.
“Defendant’s actions were despicable and in conscious disregard of Love’s rights,” her lawyers wrote at the time. “Defendant turned her into an involuntary pitchman for programs of dubious quality. Defendant created multiple commercials that falsely implied to the public that Love had endorsed HGTV’s programming.”
If successful, the cases could have raised difficult issues for advertisers who want to feature popular songs in their commercials — potentially requiring that they both clear the copyrights to the music and obtain explicit permission from any famous performers. But the litigation never got far: Love dropped her lawsuits later that year.
‘Christmas in Dixie’ Royalties Battle In Australia
When a singer-songwriter named Allan Caswell filed a lawsuit claiming that the country band Alabama had stolen key elements of their 1982 country hit “Christmas in Dixie” from his earlier song “On The Inside,” the case came with a twist: He wasn’t actually suing the band itself.
Instead, he filed his lawsuit against his own music publisher, Sony ATV Music Publishing Australia, for failing to collect royalties from the allegedly copycat song. According to an iteration of the lawsuit filed in 2012, the publisher’s musicologist concluded years earlier that the two tracks “shared a level of similarity” that went beyond a “random occurrence of sheer coincidence.”
But why sue Sony and not Alabama? According to Caswell, it was that the American band was also signed to another unit at Sony – and he claimed that his publisher was refusing to take action as a result.
“That’s the problem,” Caswell told a local TV station in Australia. “I’m signed to Sony ATV. Alabama is signed to Sony Music. So it’s all in-house. There’s no incentive for them to take action. They basically can’t take action because they’d be suing themselves.”
In 2014, an Australian judge dismissed claims by Caswell, ruling there was no evidence that Alabama frontman Teddy Gentry had ever heard “On The Inside” before he wrote his Christmas track. “I am satisfied that it is unlikely that he could have heard the plaintiff’s song by picking it up from the theme music of episodes of Prisoner,” the judge said at the time.
Jailhouse Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
If you were subjected to “constant” holiday songs for 10 straight hours every single day while serving a prison sentence, you might file a lawsuit too.
That’s what an Arizona inmate named William Lamb did in 2009, accusing Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio (yes, that Joe Arpaio) of violating his constitutional rights with a non-stop slate of Christmas tunes at a Tucson correctional facility.
According to Lamb, the prison swapped out regular television programming in favor of “constant Christmas music,” which was played in the facility “continuously and repeatedly” from 9 am to 7 pm. The playlist included secular tracks like Elmo & Patsy‘s “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and The Chipmunks, but also the Tabernacle Choir singing traditional Christmas carols.
In his lawsuit, Lamb alleged that holiday music marathons “forced him to take part in and observe a religious holiday without being given a choice,” violating the First Amendment. Arpaio argued back that the music served a secular purpose, aimed at “reducing inmate tension and promote safety in the jails” during a “difficult time of year for inmates.”
In a ruling just a week before Christmas in 2009, a federal judge agreed – saying the music served a valid non-religious purpose and didn’t primarily push religion on the inmates.
“Although Plaintiff asserts in his complaint that the purpose of the music was to force him to participate in a religious holiday, he does not explain how playing the music had a primary effect of advancing religion,” the judge wrote in the ruling. “To be sure, some of the music was religious, but the Supreme Court held [in earlier cases] that some advancement of religion does give rise to an Establishment Clause violation. A remote or incidental benefit to religion is not enough.”
Music Business Year In Review
LONDON — The music business is calling on the U.K. government to robustly protect copyright and “safeguard against misuse” by technology companies in any future regulations governing the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
On Tuesday (Dec. 17), the British government launched a 10-week consultation on how copyright protected content, such as music, can lawfully be used by developers to train generative AI models.
The proposals include introducing a new data mining exception to copyright law that would allow AI developers to use copyrighted songs for AI training, including commercial purposes, but only in instances where rights holders have not reserved their rights. Such an opt out mechanism, says the government proposal, gives creators and rights holders the ability to control, licence and monetize the use of their content – or prevent their works being used by AI developers entirely.
The consultation also recommends new transparency requirements for AI developers around what content they have used to train their models and how it was obtained, as well as the labelling of AI-generated material.
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Policymakers will additionally seek views from stakeholders on the protection of personality and image rights, and whether the current legal framework provides sufficient protection against AI-generated deepfake imitations.
“Currently, uncertainty about how copyright law applies to AI is holding back both sectors from reaching their full potential,” said the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in a statement announcing the consultation. “It can make it difficult for creators to control or seek payment for the use of their work, and creates legal risks for AI firms, stifling AI investment, innovation, and adoption.”
The government said that its proposed changes to copyright law will give clarity to AI developers over what content they are legally allowed to use when training generative AI models and “enhance” creators’ ability to be paid for the use of their work.
Before any new exceptions to copyright law can be introduced, further work would need to take place to ensure transparency standards and the mechanisms for rights holders to reserve their rights are “effective, accessible and widely adopted,” said DCMS.
“This government firmly believes that our musicians, writers, artists and other creatives should have the ability to know and control how their content is used by AI firms and be able to seek licensing deals and fair payment,” said Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, in a statement. “Achieving this, and ensuring legal certainty, will help our creative and AI sectors grow and innovate together in partnership.”
The start of the government’s long-awaited consultation on AI policy comes amid heightened lobbying from both the creative and technology industries. On Monday, a coalition of rights holders, including record labels, music publishers and artist groups, came together to call for copyright protection to be at the heart of any U.K. AI legislation.
The newly formed Creative Rights in AI Coalition, whose members include U.K. record labels trade body BPI, umbrella organization UK Music and the Music Publishers Association, wants policymakers to draw up AI laws that permit a “mutually beneficial, dynamic licensing market” built around “robust protections for copyright.”
The creative industries coalition said any future AI legislation must ensure accountability and compliance from AI developers and tech companies, who it said have thus far been exploiting copyright protected works “without permission, ignoring copyright protections and clear reservations of rights.”
The U.K. creative industries generated around £125 billion ($158 billion) for the country’s economy last year, according to government figures, with the music industry contributing a record £7.6 billion, up 13% year-on-year, of that total, according to UK Music research.
The U.K. is the world’s third-biggest recorded music market behind the U.S. and Japan with sales of $1.9 billion in 2023, according to IFPI. It is also the second-largest exporter of recorded music worldwide behind the U.S.
“Without proper control and remuneration for creators, investment in high-quality content will fall,” said the coalition, which also includes the Association of Independent Music (AIM) and British collecting societies PRS for Music and PPL, as well as trade groups representing photographers, illustrators, journalists, authors and filmmakers.
“Just as tech firms are content to pay for the huge quantity of electricity that powers their data centres, they must be content to pay for the high-quality copyright-protected works which are essential to train and ground accurate generative AI models.”
In a separate statement, BPI CEO Jo Twist said the organization was looking forward to working with the government on developing its AI policy but said it remains the BPI’s “firm view” that introducing a new exception to copyright for AI training “would weaken the U.K’s copyright system and offer AI companies permission to take – for their own profit, and without authorisation or compensation – the product of U.K. musicians’ hard work, expertise, and investment.”
“It would amount to a wholly unnecessary subsidy, worth billions of pounds, to overseas tech corporations at the expense of homegrown creators,” said Twist in a statement. She went on to say that opt-out schemes in other markets similar to what is being proposed by the U.K. government have been shown to increase legal uncertainty, “are unworkable in practice, and are woefully ineffective” in protecting creators’ rights.
The government’s recommendation to introduce a new copyright exception for AI training is an idea that it has floated before – and received strong push back from the music industry to. In 2021, the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) was heavily criticized by artists, labels and publishers for suggesting a new text and data mining (TDM) exception that would have allowed AI developers to freely use copyright-protected works for commercial purposes (albeit with certain restrictions).
Those proposals were quietly shelved by the government the following year but progress on any U.K. legislation governing the use of AI has been slow to arrive. In contrast, the 27-member block European Union, which the United Kingdom officially left in 2020, passed its world-first Artificial Intelligence Act – requiring transparency and accountability from AI developers – in March.
Meanwhile, other major music markets, including the United States, Japan and China are advancing their own attempts to regulate the nascent technology amid loud opposition from creators and rights holders over the unauthorized use of their work to train generative AI systems.
Earlier this year, the three major record companies – Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group — filed lawsuits against AI music firms Suno and Udio alleging the widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale” Sony Music and Warner Music have additionally issued public notices to AI companies warning them against scraping their copyrighted data.
More recently, in October, thousands of musicians, composers, actors and authors from across the creative industries – as well as all three major record labels – signed a statement opposing the unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI. The number of signatories has since risen to more than 37,000 people, including ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, all five members of Radiohead and The Cure’s Robert Smith.
The extreme metal tour Chaos & Carnage has returned for its sixth year on the road with veteran death metal outfit Dying Fetus leading the 16-date tour of clubs and theaters alongside longtime British metalheads Cradle of Filth.
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Both bands have long been staples of the black metal and grindcore scenes dating back to the early 1990s, and Chaos & Carnage is a touring project created by industry veterans Jason Malhoyt of Imperial Artist Management and agent JJ Cassiere, who launched indie booking agency 33 And West in 2018.
Dying Fetus and Cradle of Filth are joined on the 2025 Chaos & Carnage Tour by five support acts, including Italian symphonic death metal outfit Fleshgod Apocalypse, Australian progressive metal six piece Ne Obliviscaris, New York metal group Undeath along with newcomers Vomit Forth and Corpse Pile.
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Originally launched in 2018, Chaos & Carnage is slated to play its sixth tour this year as a showcase for the elite of heavy metal and black metal, with past headliners including Whitechapel, Carnifex, Suicide Silence, Cattle Decapitation, Lorna Shore, Humanity’s Last Breath and more.
Tickets go on sale Friday, Dec. 20, at 10 a.m. local time. VIP upgrades are available Monday, Jan. 6, at 10 a.m. local time, exclusively at ChaosAndCarnage.com.
Chaos & Carnage 2025 Tour Dates are below:
April 17 – Berkeley, CA @ UC TheatreApril 19 – Los Angeles, CA @ The WilternApril 20 – Phoenix, AZ @ The Van BurenApril 22 – Albuquerque, NM @ El Rey Theater 04/24 Dallas, TX @ Granada TheaterApril 26 – San Antonio, TX @ Vibes Event Center 04/27 Houston, TX @ House of BluesApril 29 – Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn BowlMay 1 – New York, NY @ Palladium Times Square 05/02 Richmond, VA @ The NationalMay 3 – Reading, PA @ ReverbMay 4 – Worcester, MA @ The PalladiumMay 6 – Montreal, QC CAN @ L’OlympiaMay 7 – Toronto, ONT CAN @ RebelMay 8 – Pontiac, MI @ The CrofootMay 9 – Chicago, IL @ RadiusMay 10 – Des Moines, IA @ Val Air BallroomMay 12 – Wichita, KS @ Temple LiveMay 14 – Denver, CO @ Fillmore Auditorium
Daddy Yankee filed a legal motion Friday (Dec. 13) in Puerto Rico seeking an injunction against his soon-to-be ex-wife Mireddys González, alleging she withdrew $80 million from the bank account of his El Cartel Records “without authorization,” according to court documents obtained by Billboard.
The filing by the reggaetón hitmaker (Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez) was made in a court in San Juan against González, her sister Ayeicha González Castellanos and El Cartel Records, a company founded by Yankee where González allegedly serves as CEO and González Castellanos serves as secretary/treasurer.
The 16-page filing claims that “in spite of the plaintiff being the owner of the shares of the company and being the reason for the existence of the corporation Cartel Records Inc., today he lacks access, interference and information, to all that he generated and continues to generate and to which he is entitled.”
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Now, Yankee is asking that the court provide “immediate removal of the plaintiffs from any function or interference in the corporations as officers or administrators thereof and the delivery of the information and documentation that they have illegitimately withheld.”
Yankee claims that González and González Castellanos improperly moved to “concentrate in their persons a greater power over the operations of the Cartel than was authorized, which has resulted in a detrimental and negligent performance for the company.” He also claims they “failed to render an accurate account of their actions, disregarded formalities and requirements of the corporate legislation, irresponsible financial decisions.”
In one claim detailed in Friday’s court filing, Yankee says González hired a third party to represent El Cartel in the sale of the plaintiff’s music catalog to Concord, which Billboard reported in October. He claims the transaction was formalized by selling these rights at a price that “turned out to be unreasonable, disproportionate and far below the real value.”
“Despite the plaintiff having signed the agreement, under the advice of that third party and the defendants, the plaintiff was not provided with a copy of all the contract documents, and to this day he does not know the real scope of the transaction, nor does he have detailed knowledge of what was or was not sold, nor the limitations he may have on the use of his musical creations,” the filing reads.
According to the legal filing, the huge theft of company funds occurred on Thursday (Dec. 12) after Yankee had already revoked González and González Castellanos’ authority and had “warned that they could not carry out any transactions on behalf of El Cartel.”
“Without the knowledge and authorization of the plaintiff and in violation of the requirements of the Law, a bank transfer was made, withdrawing, according to the information obtained, eighty million dollars from the corporate account of the entity,” his lawyers wrote.
Billboard reached out to González and González Castellanos for comment but did not hear back at press time.
The new legal battle comes just weeks after Daddy Yankee and González announced they were divorcing after 20 years of marriage.
“With a heart full of respect and honesty, I want to share some important news about my personal life,” Yankee said in a statement on his Instagram Stories on Dec. 2. “After more than two decades of marriage and after many months of trying to save my marriage, which my wife and I share, today my lawyers respond to the divorce petition received by Mireddys.”
Besides her role as CEO of El Cartel, González was also the manager of the reggeatón artist and is widely known to wield broad influence over Yankee’s music career. As the artist previously told Billboard: “She’s the boss. She has always been the boss.”
TikTok on Monday asked the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis to block the federal law that would ban the popular platform in the United States unless its China-based parent company agreed to sell it.
Lawyers for the company and China-based ByteDance urged the justices to step in before the law’s Jan. 19 deadline. A similar plea was expected from content creators who rely on the platform for income and some of TikTok’s more than 170 million users in the U.S.
The companies have said that a shutdown lasting just a month would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.
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The case could attract the court’s interest because it pits free speech rights against the government’s stated aims of protecting national security, while raising novel issues about social media platforms.
The request first goes to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals from courts in the nation’s capital. He almost certainly will seek input from all nine justices.
On Friday, a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied an emergency plea to block the law, a procedural ruling that allowed the case to move to the Supreme Court.
The same panel had earlier unanimously upheld the law over a First Amendment challenge claiming that it violated free speech rights.
Without a court-ordered freeze, the law would take effect Jan. 19 and expose app stores that offer TikTok and internet hosting services that support it to potential fines.
It would be up to the Justice Department to enforce the law, investigating possible violations and seeking sanctions. But lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance have argued that the Justice Department might pause enforcement or otherwise seek to mitigate the law’s most severe consequences because President-elect Donald Trump pledged during the campaign that he would “save TikTok.”
Trump takes office a day after the law goes into effect.
The Supreme Court could temporarily put the law on hold so that they can give fuller consideration to First Amendment and other issues.
On the other hand, the justices could reject the emergency appeal, which would allow the law to take effect as scheduled.
The case has made a relatively quick trip through the courts once bipartisan majorities in Congress approved the law and President Joe Biden signed it in April.
This story was originally published by The Associated Press.
Three years after Downtown Music sold its 145,000-song catalog — including works performed by Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Bruno Mars and Beyoncé — the president of its publishing division says it makes more money than it did when it owned copyrights.
That reveal comes amid Monday’s announcement that Universal Music Group’s Virgin Music Group is buying Downtown Music Holdings for $775 million in an all-cash deal expected to close by mid-next year.
Emily Stephenson, who since 2023 has been president of Downtown’s suite of publishing companies (Downtown Music Publishing, Songtrust and Sheer), says her division will generate more than $200 million in revenue in 2024, a 40% increase from last year and a higher gross than it had in 2020, the year before Concord bought its catalog.
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“We are in the middle of extreme growth mode right now,” says Stephenson, who has overseen client acquisition, business development, A&R, rights management and client services for Downtown since March 2023.
Since Stephenson took the lead, the publishing division has signed deals with indie rockers The National, Spirit Music Group and Peso Pluma’s Double P Records. According to the company, it now serves some 2 million songwriters and clients in over 60 countries — more than 40% of them outside the United States — manages over 1.5 million copyrights and has distributed over $100 million in royalties through Songtrust.
Access to additional funds has helped. In May, Downtown announced it secured another $500 million in credit from Bank of America — on top of its previous $200 million credit facility — to finance advances.
“We have been earnestly and aggressively putting that money to work,” Stephenson says, by offering competitive advances without forcing independent creators to give up any rights. As a result, “We think we’re growing at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the industry,” she says.
That growth is one of Downtown’s draws. The combined market share held by independent distribution and music companies — i.e. non-major labels and self-releasing artists — rose to 36.7% in 2023, up from 28.6% in 2015, according to MIDiA Research. As a result, the majors have made acquisitions and investments to defend their market share. Downtown’s scale and position of dominance in this segment made it an attractive way for UMG to grow.
However, Downtown’s growth has also led to customer complaints of long wait times at Songtrust and concerns that the platform is becoming more exclusive. Stephenson says there are no plans to restrict who can sign up for Songtrust, adding that over the past year, Songtrust has cut the average response time to customer complaints from 33 days to 17 hours.
Stephenson, 35, has spent more than a decade at Downtown and previously served as Downtown Music vp of business operations, and she says roughly 70% of the managers in her division have similarly long tenures.
That experience has helped with client retention and led to facilitating opportunities. This past summer, “Parade” by French composer Victor le Masne, a Downtown client, became the official theme song for the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games. This holiday season, the team landed Griff’s cover of the Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory classic “Pure Imagination” in Target’s Christmas campaign.
“We are the only player doing this at scale for indie songwriters globally,” Stephenson says. “I think our future is bright.”
A version of this story appears in the Dec. 14, 2024, issue of Billboard.
In July, six women — Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Ariana Grande and Charli XCX — cracked the top 10 of the Billboard 200, the first time that had happened since 2019. And when Grammy nominations were announced Nov. 8, six of the eight slots for record, album and song of the year were headlined by women — the second year in a row women had such high representation in the major categories. Women artists are ruling pop music in 2024.
At the major companies that power these superstars, however, women have been leaving powerful roles — moves that have rattled other women fighting for inclusion and influence at the top of the business. Between Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music and Warner Music Group (WMG) — the three major music companies — there were four labels that started this year with women CEOs: Capitol Music Group’s Michelle Jubelirer, Atlantic Music Group’s Julie Greenwald, Epic Records’ Sylvia Rhone and UMG Nashville’s Cindy Mabe. Eleven months later, that number has dropped: Rhone, who is also one of very few Black CEOs in the major label system, is the only one left at the coastal majors. And a number of other women left music’s C-suites this year as part of major-label restructurings that impacted both genders.
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It hasn’t been all bad news for women execs: Mabe is still in place at UMG Nashville, and Taylor Lindsey, who had been vp of A&R, will take the chairman/CEO role at Sony Music Nashville at the top of 2025. But the high-profile departures have shaken the confidence of many women music executives, says a high-ranking woman in the industry: “It makes them nervous because people like Julie Greenwald didn’t take shit from anybody. And the message is, ‘Oh my God, look at that. If they can let Julie Greenwald go, anybody can go.’”
The CEOs of the industry’s biggest streaming services, promotion companies and most agencies, meanwhile, are all men; many distribution CEOs are, too. Publishing and Nashville both fare better, but the industry is largely led by men in the top jobs. Most of the top indie labels are led by men as well.
Jubelirer, Greenwald, Rhone, Mabe and former Motown CEO/chair Ethiopia Habtemariam, who left her role at the end of 2022 and was not replaced, either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Despite the varied reasons for these departures, the decline in the number of women among music’s top ranks marks a step backwards during a decade that started with the Black Lives Matter movement and the major music companies pledging to better embrace diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. As Andreea Gleeson, CEO of TuneCore, puts it, “There’s not a full effort being made and that’s really dangerous. To drive meaningful change in the diversity of your company, you need to be committed to it. That starts at the top.”
Natalie Prospere, founder and CEO of the label, publishing and live events company Friends Only, says she hasn’t been surprised by the recent exits. “I knew this was going to happen. Nobody actually wants to stand for anything other than posting a black square on your Instagram.”
There are still many women in COO, president, GM and other chief-level or department-head roles across the major label system. But the actual CEOs are still almost all white men. According to Believe, Tunecore and MIDiA Research’s fourth annual “Be The Change” women’s equality in music study, in 2024, 49% of women also believe that the music industry is still “generally discriminative” based on gender. The study also found that women in music are twice as likely as men to discover they are paid less than colleagues in the same or similar roles.
“When you see the scarcity of female executives in the music industry, coupled with the way female executives are treated, how, as a young woman in the industry, can you not question your ability to succeed?” says a female former label executive.
At the labels, Jubelirer was the first to go this year. In February, amid reports that Capitol and its parent company UMG were restructuring, Jubelirer stepped down from her post, which she held since the end of 2021, as Capitol’s first female CEO in its entire 80-year history. Had she stayed, Jubelirer would have been effectively demoted, moved from being the head of her own family of record labels and reporting straight to UMG chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge, to being under the umbrella of the newly formed Interscope Capitol Labels Group (ICLG) and reporting to ICLG chairman/CEO John Janick. She was replaced by Tom March, a British-born executive who most recently led Interscope offshoot Geffen Records.
Then, in September, Greenwald announced her exit from her role at Atlantic Music Group, a company she co-led for 20 years, the latter two as its first female CEO in its own 70-plus-year history, amid a similar restructuring in WMG’s recorded music division. She was replaced by Grainge’s son, Elliot Grainge, the founder/CEO of WMG-acquired label 10K Projects.
These high-profile exits come two years after Habtemariam, chair/CEO at Motown, stepped down from her post when rumors began to circulate that Motown would lose its status as a standalone label and would be reintegrated under Capitol Music Group, which ultimately did happen. While the label’s profitability during Habtemariam’s tenure is unclear, Habtemariam took Motown’s U.S. current market share from 0.85% to 1.30%.
The recent executive departures are even more troubling to some women in the industry given the challenges these women had faced getting to their top posts in the first place. When Steve Barnett retired as Capitol Music Group CEO at the end of 2019, Jubelirer, an attorney who worked her way up over a decade to become COO of Capitol, was believed by many to be the next in line. Instead, the role was given to Capitol Records president Jeff Vaughn. (Under Vaughn, Capitol’s current market share dipped from 7.36% in 2020 to 5.64% in 2021. He was replaced by Jubelirer in less than a year). While market share cannot tell the full story of Capitol Music Group financials at the time, Jubelirer then grew CMG market share by almost a full percentage point from 2022 to 2023.
While Mary Rahmani, CEO and founder of Moon Projects, a joint venture label/publisher with Republic Records/Warner Chappell Music, says she came up in the major label business around “lots of women assistants and coordinators,” there were not many women executives to look up to. “If there were any, they were specifically in PR, radio and sync. I didn’t really see many badass women A&R or marketing executives, and I always wished there were more examples for me.”
Years later, when Rahmani was on maternity leave with her first child, she was cut from the major label she worked for during a sweep of layoffs. Reflecting on the experience now, she says it “wasn’t personal,” but feels motherhood is often a reason why it’s harder for women to climb up the ladder in the way men, even men who have children, do. “It’s for sure a big reason. I think a lot of women in the mid-level phase take a step back once they have a family.”
At Billboard’s Women in Music event in March, Jubelirer accepted the award for Executive of the Year and highlighted another way women face extra adversity in the workplace: their presentation. “Women, do these comments sound familiar?” Jubelirer addressed the crowd. “‘You’re too emotional.’ ‘You don’t have to be so direct when you talk.’ We all know that’s code for ‘Stop being a bitch.’ ‘You should smile more.’ … We know that it takes quite a bit of fortitude to present our true selves in the workplace and rebel against those stereotypes that have been expected of women.”
In some other areas of the music business, women fare better in their share of CEO roles. Though it’s far from gender parity, the publishing sector is a bright spot. Many of publishing’s most respected leaders are women, including Universal Music Publishing Group’s CEO/chair Jody Gerson, who has held her post for a decade, and Warner Chappell’s COO/co-chair Carianne Marshall at the majors and Reservoir Media’s founder/CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi and Peermusic’s CEO Mary Megan Peer at the large independents.
“It’s likely a result of a positive feedback loop,” says Khosrowshahi of the publishing sector. “As more women rise to the top of various publishing entities, that leads to the success of more women [beneath them].”
Ironically, though women artists in country music struggle to make their voices heard on country radio, the presence of female CEOs and chairs is stronger in Nashville. Today, all three major labels in town have women in their highest ranks: Mabe is chair/CEO of UMG Nashville, Lindsey is soon to become chairman/CEO of Sony Nashville, and Cris Lacy is co-chair/co-president of Warner Music Nashville.
The C-suites at the majors do have women among their ranks: Alamo, ICLG, The Orchard and Verve all have women COOs in Juliette Jones, Annie Lee, Colleen Theis and Dawn Olejar, respectively; Julie Swidler is general counsel at Sony Music and Erica Bellarosa holds the same title at Atlantic Music Group; Republic Records counts Wendy Goldstein as president/chief creative officer and Donna Gryn as chief marketing officer; Capitol (Lilia Parsa), Columbia (Jenifer Mallory), Virgin (Jacqueline Saturn), Interscope (Michelle An, Nicole Wyskoarko), Atlantic (Lanre Gaba), 10K Projects (Molly McLachlan), 300 Entertainment (Rayna Bass), ADA (Cat Kreidich) and EMPIRE (Tina Davis) all have women with president or co-president titles; and high-ranking women can be found across the corporate majors and individual labels.
But the path to the chief executive’s office remains an especially challenging one — and even then, some women CEOs say they still feel excluded from the conversations, meetings or other gatherings where decision-making happens in their organizations.
When Greenwald was named Billboard’s 2017 Women in Music Executive of the Year, she spoke of how she hoped her platform could lead to more women executives in the next generation. “I love all the women here who put their hands up and say, ‘Listen, at some point I want your chair,’” Greenwald said. “I want someone to come take this chair. I want women to come in with a tape measure.”
The independent music sector has offered executives like Rahmani, Gleeson, Khosrowshahi, Prospere and Milana Rabkin Lewis, co-founder/CEO of STEM Disintermedia, another path, thanks to the growth of indie music’s market share both in the U.S. and abroad. For Rabkin Lewis, who got her start at UTA before founding the distributor/label, she says she wanted to run her own independent company because “I could be more in control. I also wanted to set a new example, and I wanted to create my own path, which potentially had [fewer] road bumps and hurdles than the perceived corporate path.”
Still, a high-ranking female music executive says it’s essential for the next generation to see women in CEO and chairwoman roles at the major labels specifically because “power comes in P&L responsibility, and there’s a scarcity of women at major labels who have P&L responsibility.” Another adds, “The major labels are the front lines… They’re the ones that set the tone for how the industry is going to proceed.”
Representatives for UMG, WMG and Sony declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment.