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A Michigan judge narrowed the issues Monday in a dispute over Aretha Franklin’s estate, saying the only task for jurors is to decide whether a 2014 document handwritten by the Queen of Soul and found in couch cushions can be accepted as a valid will.
The stipulation was made by attorneys for Franklin’s sons before a jury was seated in Oakland County Probate Court.
Franklin died in 2018 at age 76. But five years later, the music superstar’s estate remains unsettled. A son, Ted White II, believes a 2010 handwritten will should mainly control the estate, but two other sons, Kecalf Franklin and Edward Franklin, are in favor of a 2014 document.
Both were found in 2019, months after Franklin died. The 2014 document was under cushions at Franklin’s home in suburban Detroit.
The brothers sat shoulder to shoulder behind their lawyers in Judge Jennifer Callaghan’s courtroom. Another brother, Clarence Franklin, is under a guardianship and apparently is not participating in the trial.
There are differences between the documents, though they both appear to indicate the sons would share income from music and copyrights, which seems to make that issue less contentious than a few others.
The 2014 version crossed out White’s name as executor and has Kecalf Franklin in his place. Kecalf Franklin and grandchildren would get his mother’s main home in Bloomfield Hills, which was valued at $1.1 million when she died but is worth much more today.
For five years, Aretha Franklin’s estate has been handled at different times by three executors, known under Michigan estate law as a personal representative. A niece, Sabrina Owens, quit in 2020, citing a “rift” among the sons.
The last public accounting filed in March showed the estate had income of $3.9 million during the previous 12-month period and a similar amount of spending, including more than $900,000 in legal fees to various firms.
Overall assets were pegged at $4.1 million, mostly cash and real estate, though Franklin’s creative works and intellectual property were undervalued with just a nominal $1 figure.
A Los Angeles judge says Lady Gaga is not obligated to pay out on a $500,000 “no questions asked” reward for the return of her stolen French bulldogs — at least not to a woman who was criminally charged over the violent 2021 incident.
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In a ruling Monday (July 10) reported by TMZ, Judge Holly J. Fujie dismissed a breach of contract lawsuit filed by Jennifer McBride, who pleaded no contest in December to receiving stolen property in connection with the gunpoint robbery in which Gaga’s dog walker Ryan Fischer was shot and nearly killed.
McBride had argued that Gaga’s offer of a reward was “unilateral” — meaning she had to pay up no matter the circumstances. But in Monday’s decision, Judge Fujie reportedly agreed with arguments from Gaga’s attorneys: That a criminal like McBridge could not “profit from her participation in a crime.”
Neither side immediately returned requests for comment on Monday.
McBride is one of five people charged over the Feb. 24, 2021, gunpoint dog-napping of Gaga’s bulldogs, Koji and Gustav. Prosecutors say the singer was not specifically targeted, and that the group was merely trying to steal French bulldogs, which can be worth thousands of dollars.
James Howard Jackson, the man who shot Fischer during the robbery, took a plea deal in December and was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
Days after the attack, it was McBride who returned the dogs to police, claiming she’d found the animals tied to a pole and asking about the reward. While police initially told the media that McBride appeared to be “uninvolved and unassociated” with the crime, she was later connected to the robbery and charged with one count of receiving stolen property and one count of being an accessory after the fact. In December, she pleaded no contest to the property charge and was sentenced to two years of probation.
But just two months later, McBride was back in court again — filing a civil lawsuit claiming she deserves the credit for returning the superstar’s bulldogs. The case argued Gaga made a binding “unilateral” offer to pay the reward in return for the safe return of the dogs, and that McBride had taken her up on the proposal by flipping on the men who actually committed the robbery.
“Plaintiff accepted defendants’ unilateral offer by contacting defendants, and delivering Lady Gaga’s bulldogs to defendants at the Los Angeles Police Department,” McBride’s lawyer, K.T. Tran, wrote in the lawsuit. “Plaintiff has fully performed her obligation under the unilateral contract.”
But Gaga’s attorneys quickly moved to end the case, arguing last month that it would be absurd to allow McBride to “profit from her participation in a crime” and “rewarded for her role in the conspiracy.”
“The law does not allow a person to commit a crime and then profit from it,” Gaga’s lawyers at the firm Gibson Dunn wrote in their filings. “This principle applies with extra force in this case because the theft of Defendant’s dogs was facilitated by a violent gun crime that left one man nearly dead.”
The board of directors at Gibson Brands has confirmed Cesar Gueikian as president/CEO of Gibson Brands. Gueikian, who previously served as brand president, was named as interim CEO following the exit of Gibson Brands’ former president/CEO, James Curleigh, in May. Gueikian joined Gibson in 2018 and has been instrumental in the resurgence of the instrument […]
DaBaby has been dropped from a copyright lawsuit accusing him and Dua Lipa of ripping off their smash hit “Levitating” from decades-old songs.
In an order Monday (July 10), a Manhattan federal judge granted a request by lawyers for L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer to voluntarily dismiss the rapper from their case, which claims Lipa’s massive hit infringed their 1979 song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and their 1980 song “Don Diablo.”
The accusers did not explain why they were dropping their case against DaBaby (real name Jonathan Lyndale Kirk), who featured on a popular remix of Lipa’s song. But they made clear that the case would continue against Lipa herself and music companies involved in the song: “For the avoidance of doubt, plaintiffs maintain and do not hereby dismiss their claims against any other defendant in this matter.”
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An attorney for Brown and Linzer declined to comment on why they had dismissed DaBaby from the case. An attorney for DaBaby did not return a request for comment.
Brown and Linzer’s case, filed in March 2022, was one of two federal copyright lawsuits filed in quick succession over “Levitating” — a massive hit that spent 77 weeks on the Hot 100 and was named the No. 1 Hot 100 song of 2021. The case claimed the melody that starts just a few seconds into “Levitating,” when Lipa sings “If you wanna run away with me,” was a “duplicate” of a similar passage featured in the two earlier songs.
The other “Levitating” case, filed just days earlier by a reggae band named Artikal Sound System, claimed Lipa had lifted her song’s core hook from their little-known 2015 song “Live Your Life.” But the band dropped that lawsuit last month, just days after a federal judge cast serious doubt on whether Artikal could prove that Lipa ever even heard their song.
Though Brown and Linzer’s case will continue against Lipa, they could be facing a similar ruling soon.
Last summer, Lipa’s lawyers made the same arguments as they made in the Artikal case, saying the two accusers could not prove that she had ever had “access” to the earlier songs — a make-or-break requirement for any copyright lawsuit. Brown and Linzer’s attorneys have countered that their songs had millions of listens on internet platforms, giving the “Levitating” writers ample opportunity to hear them.
A ruling on that question is pending.
Seeing is believing for some investors in Sphere Entertainment Co., the developer of the new state-of-the-art venue, The Sphere, in Las Vegas. Shares of Sphere Entertainment soared 22.7% this week after the world saw the first videos of the dazzling display created by the 580,000 square feet of programmable LED “pucks” on Exosphere, the exterior […]
From ChatGPT writing code for software engineers to Bing’s search engine sliding in place of your bi-weekly Hinge binge, we’ve become obsessed with the capacity for artificial intelligence to replace us.
Within creative industries, this fixation manifests in generative AI. With models like DALL-E generating images from text prompts, the popularity of generative AI challenges how we understand the integrity of the creative process: When generative models are capable of materializing ideas, if not generating their own, where does that leave artists?
Google’s new text-based music generative AI, MusicLM, offers an interesting answer to this viral terminator-meets-ex-machina narrative. As a model that produces “high-fidelity music from text descriptions,” MusicLM embraces moments lost in translation that encourages creative exploration. It sets itself apart from other music generation models like Jukedeck and MuseNet by inviting users to verbalize their original ideas rather than toggle with existing music samples.
Describing how you feel is hard
AI in music is not new. But between recommending songs for Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists to composing royalty free music with Jukedeck, applications of AI in music have evaded the long-standing challenge of directly mapping words to music.
This is because, as a form of expression on its own, music resonates differently to each listener. The same way that different languages struggle to perfectly communicate nuances of respective cultures, it is difficult (if not impossible) to exhaustively capture all dimensions of music in words.
MusicLM takes on this challenge by generating audio clips from descriptions like “a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff,” even accounting for less tangible inputs like “hypnotic and trance-like.” It approaches this thorny question of music categorization with a refreshing sense of self awareness. Rather than focusing on lofty notions of style, MusicLM grounds itself in more tangible attributes of music with tags such as “snappy”, or “amateurish.” It broadly considers where an audio clip may come from (eg. “Youtube Tutorial”), the general emotional responses it may conjure (eg. “madly in love”), while integrating more widely accepted concepts of genre and compositional technique.
What you expect is (not) what you get
Piling onto this theoretical question of music classification is the more practical shortage of training data. Unlike its creative counterparts (e.g. DALL-E), there isn’t an abundance of text-to-audio captions readily available.
MusicLM was trained by a library of 5,521 music samples captioned by musicians called ‘MusicCaps.’ Bound by the very human limitation of capacity and the almost-philosophical matter of style, MusicCaps offers finite granularity in its semantic interpretation of musical characteristics. The result is occasional gaps between user inputs and generated outputs: the “happy, energetic” tune you asked for may not turn out as you expect.
However, when asked about this discrepancy, MusicLM researcher Chris Donahue and research software engineer Andrea Agostinelli celebrate the human element of the model. They describe primary applications such as “[exploring] ideas more efficiently [or overcoming] writer’s block,” quick to note that MusicLM does offer multiple interpretations of the same prompt — so if one generated track fails to meet your expectations, another might.
“This [disconnect] is a big research direction for us, there isn’t a single answer,” Andrea admits. Chris attributes this disconnect to the “abstract relationship between music and text” insisting that “how we react to music is [even more] loosely defined.”
In a way — by fostering an exchange that welcomes moments lost in translation — MusicLM’s language-based structure positions the model as a sounding board: as you prompt the model with a vague idea, the generation of approximates help you figure out what you actually want to make.
Beauty is in breaking things
With their experience producing Chain Tripping (2019) — a Grammy-nominated album entirely made with MusicVAE (another music generative AI developed by Google) — the band YACHT chimes in on MusicLM’s future in music production. “As long as it can be broken apart a little bit and tinkered with, I think there’s great potential,” says frontwoman Claire L. Evans.
To YACHT, generative AI exists as a means to an end, rather than the end in itself. “You never make exactly what you set out to make,” says founding member Jona Bechtolt, describing the mechanics of a studio session. “It’s because there’s this imperfect conduit that is you” Claire adds, attributing the alluring and evocative process of producing music to the serendipitous disconnect that occurs when artists put pen to paper.
The band describes how the misalignment of user inputs and generated work inspires creativity through iteration. “There is a discursive quality to [MusicLM]… it’s giving you feedback… I think it’s the surreal feeling of seeing something in the mirror, like a funhouse mirror,” says Claire. “A computer accent,” band member Rob Kieswetter jokes, referencing a documentary about the band’s experience making Chain Tripping.
However, in discussing the implications of this move to text-to-audio generation, Claire cautions the rise of taxonomization in music: “imperfect semantic elements are great, it’s the precise ones that we should worry about… [labels] create boundaries to discovery and creation that don’t need to exist… everyone’s conditioned to think about music as this salad of hyper-specific genre references [that can be used] to conjure a new song.”
Nonetheless, both YACHT and the MusicLM team agrees that MusicLM — as it currently is — holds promise. “Either way there’s going to be a whole new slew of artists fine-tuning this tool to their needs,” Rob contends.
Engineer Andrea recalls instances where creative tools weren’t popularized for its intended purpose: “the synthesizer eventually opened up a huge wave of new genres and ways of expression. [It unlocked] new ways to express music, even for people who are not ‘musicians.’” “Historically, it has been pretty difficult to predict how each piece of music technology will play out,” researcher Chris concludes.
Happy accidents, reinvention, and self-discovery
Back to the stubborn, unforgiving question: Will generative AI replace musicians? Perhaps not.
The relationship between artists and AI is not a linear one. While it’s appealing to prescribe an intricate and carefully intentional system of collaboration between artists and AI, as of right now, the process of using AI in producing art resembles more of a friendly game of trial and error.
In music, AI gives room for us to explore the latent spaces between what we describe and what we really mean. It materializes ideas in a way that helps shape creative direction. By outlining these acute moments lost in translation, tools like MusicLM sets us up to produce what actually ends up making it to the stage… or your Discover Weekly.
Tiffany Ng is an art & tech writer based in NYC. Her work has been published in i-D Vice, Vogue, South China Morning Post, and Highsnobiety.
TikTok and a group of five content creators who are suing the state of Montana over its first-in-the-nation law to ban the video sharing app are now asking a federal judge to block implementation of the law while the case moves through the courts and before it takes effect in January.
The separate requests for preliminary injunctions were filed Wednesday in federal court in Missoula. The cases challenging the law were filed in May and have since been consolidated by U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen had the bill drafted over concerns — shared by the FBI and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken — that the app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, could be used to allow the Chinese government to access information on U.S. citizens or push pro-Beijing misinformation that could influence the public. TikTok has said none of this has ever happened.
The motions for injunctions make the same arguments as the cases against the state — that the ban is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights and that the state has no authority to regulate foreign affairs.
Attorneys on both sides have agreed to a schedule that calls for the state to respond to the motions by mid-August and for the plaintiffs to file their replies by mid-September, court records state.
The company and the Montana content creators argue a preliminary injunction should be granted because the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their challenges to the law and if the ban took effect it would cause irreparable harm by depriving them of the ability to express themselves and communicate with others.
TikTok has safeguards to moderate content and protect minors, and would not share information with China, the company has argued. But critics have pointed to China’s 2017 national intelligence law that compels companies to cooperate with the country’s governments for state intelligence work.
“TikTok users don’t use the app – the app uses them and turns them into a spying apparatus for the Chinese Communist Party,” Emily Flower, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office, said in a statement that also noted recent reporting that TikTok is paying for the lawsuit filed by the content creators. “TikTok’s ‘support’ is bought and paid for – Montanans recognize the threat that the app poses to their privacy and national security.”
More than half of U.S. states, including Montana, and the federal government have banned TikTok from government-owned devices.
Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill into law in May, saying Montana was taking “the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.”
As of June 1, Gianforte also prohibited the use of any social media apps tied to foreign adversaries on state equipment and for state businesses. Among the apps he listed are WeChat, whose parent company is headquartered in China; and Telegram Messenger, which was founded in Russia.
Vinyl Me, Please, the ebullient record of the month club (and pressing plant) based in Denver, hired creative veterans Rob Jones and Alan Hynes to add some rocket fuel to VMP’s product line. In their new roles (Jones as executive creative director and Hynes as senior creative director), the duo will help guide VMP’s artistic direction and work alongside existing creatives on custom record packaging designs for releases. They’ll also work with studios and composers to bring movie scores to vinyl as part of its new Soundtracks offering, beginning with a new pressing of Dave Grusin’s score for The Goonies later this summer. Jones joins VMP after a successful couple of decades as co-founder of Mondo, the maker of pop culture collectibles (including vinyl records and posters) that was acquired by Funko last year. Hynes also arrives from Mondo, where he played an integral role in its design department for years — creating original record packaging for films like Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut and others.
“Bringing joy to people through tangible, transcendent experiences with music is what VMP is about and what we’re always striving to offer our customers,” said Cam Schaefer, CEO of VMP. “The addition of Rob and Alan to the team takes us to the moon creatively and fills out a 1992 Olympic Dream Team of art and design. Their experience, mind-bending creativity, and passion for exploration will allow them to make a deep impact within VMP and help us to elevate and expand our product line for customers. We’re lucky to have them.”
Liliahn Majeed exited her post as Universal Music Group‘s first global chief diversity, inclusion and belonging officer for a similar DEI role at L’Oréal. During her three years at UMG, Majeed led a team focused on boosting the label giant’s inclusion and equity efforts, and she notably co-chaired one of the committees of UMG’s high profile “Task Force for Meaningful Change.” Before Majeed traded the globe’s No. 1 music company for the No. 1 beauty firm, she held senior marketing and diversity roles at the NBA and earlier, at Frito-Lay. Majeed moves into the chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer, North America role at L’Oréal following the retirement of Angela Guy.
Warner Music Latina appointed Andrés Shaq as A&R director. He’ll be based in Miami and report to Hector Ruben Rivera, senior vice president and head of A&R Latin Music. Shaq was previously senior A&R manager at Warner Music Colombia, where he spent three years and played a key role in the careers of artists like Piso 21, Mike Bahía and Blessd. He also signed notable Colombian producers such as ICON, DJ MAFF, and SOG. “Colombia and the Andean region have an abundance of incredible talent waiting to be discovered. I’m fully committed to discovering and fostering future Latin superstars,” said Shaq. –Leila Cobo
Sony Pictures Television tapped Palash Ahmed to lead new efforts to develop more music-connected projects at the studio. As head of music development — a newly created role — Ahmed will work with studio president of international production Wayne Garvie on synergistic pairings with obvious partners (Sony Music’s recorded music and publishing divisions), as well as with non-Sony artists and labels. In announcing Ahmed’s new role, studio chairman Ravi Ahuja said film and TV content with a music tie-in “comes with a built-in, highly engaged fanbase, and we are excited to begin leaning in to opportunities to develop projects with musical artist connections.” Ahmed, who is based in Los Angeles, joined Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2017 and most recently held the title of senior vp of corporate development.
Tim McGraw‘s management and marketing company, EM.Co, appointed Doug Phillips as vp of marketing and digital. Phillips has previously worked at companies including Q Prime South, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Nashville. Concurrently, EM.Co vice president Brian Kaplan joins McGraw’s media venture Down Home as co-founder and chief strategy officer. Down Home launched earlier this year with partners Skydance and social content studio Shareability. –Jessica Nicholson
Faryal Khan-Thompson joined Downtown-owned music distributor CD Baby as senior vice president of marketing and community engagement, responsible for strategy around the disciplines in her job title, as well as branding initiatives, artist education efforts and growing the company internationally. The NYC-based Khan-Thompson was previously vp of international at TuneCore. “I am committed to building on the great work that has been done and positioning CD Baby as the leading provider of music distribution services for independent artists,” she said. CD Baby recently made headlines by sunsetting most of its physical distribution business — namely, that it will no longer warehouse or distribute the CDs that it makes for artists.
ICYMI: Big Machine Music elevated Mike Molinar to president of the publishing company.
Justin Chacona was named vice president of brand & marketing at Stockholm-based production music company Epidemic Sound, where he’ll lead a team of 40-plus staffers working on marketing and PR initiatives, social media strategy and consumer relations as the company eyes expansion into new markets. Launched in 2009, Epidemic offers a catalog of restriction-free music for use in videos, podcasts and other content. Chacona joins from Polar Electro where he’s been group chief marketing officer since 2020. Earlier in his career, Chacona worked at Rovio Entertainment, where he led marketing efforts surrounding the video game developer’s hit movie for Angry Birds. Chacona’s appointment follows the hiring of Rob Bullough as global brand director earlier this year.
Vickie Nauman was appointed to the advisory board of Interstellar Music Services, a specialist digital rights management company. Based in Los Angeles, Nauman is the founder and CEO of music and tech consultancy CrossBorderWorks and before that held executive roles at 7digital and Sonos. Interstellar, which launched in January, works to maximize the collection of royalties via a suite of services that includes digital distribution, brand partnerships, metadata cleaning, neighboring rights, publishing administration and detailed analysis/reporting. “The Company sits right at the intersection of music and innovation,” said Nauman, “so I hope that it will benefit from my experience as it enters its next phase of growth.”
Youth-focused social media platform Zigazoo hired Joe Kelley as director of music partnerships. In his new role, Kelley will lead outreach efforts with the music industry at large as the short video app looks to build on the recent launch of its product for kids 13 and up. Kelley had plenty of experience connecting with music acts during his four years as Billboard‘s head of artist relations — booking talent for a wide swath of events and other branded franchises. After leaving Billboard, Kelley worked as an artist manager and, more recently, as head of artist partnerships at music impact events platform WithOthers.
The Royal College of Music has enlisted James Williams to be only its 11th director since the prestigious school, located in South Kensington, London, was founded in 1882. Williams will join RCM on Sept. 1, 2024, succeeding current director Colin Lawson, who is retiring. Williams is managing director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a position he has held since June 2016.
Nashville Bites: Universal Music Group Nashville hired Charlene Bryant as senior vp of business development and strategy. For the last five years, she ran her own company, Riveter Management, a multigenre firm whose clients have included hip-hop artist Trippie Redd… Rachel Burleson was promoted to Big Machine Label Group director of streaming from Big Machine Records project manager… SMACKSongs promoted Sam Sarno to creative director from creative manager… Mark Turcotte starts July 18 as Nashville-based Outback Presents senior vp of marketing. He arrives from Cox Media/Atlanta, where he was general sales manager. –Tom Roland
Kanye West is facing another lawsuit about unsafe conditions at his Donda Academy, including that the bizarre allegation that the school lacked windows because the embattled rapper “did not like glass.”
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In a lawsuit filed Thursday (July 6) in Los Angeles, former Donda Academy gym teacher Isaiah Meadows says he was unfairly fired after he raised concerns about inconsistent pay and serious health and safety issues — allegedly including overflowing sceptic tanks and dangerous electrical fires.
The new case came just three months after a group of other former Donda employees filed a similar case against West (who legally changed his name to Ye) and his private school, alleging they had been terminated after complaining about shoddy pay and bad conditions.
Like the previous case, the new lawsuit paints a strange picture of life inside West’s school and the Yeezy Christian Academy that preceded it. In one accusation, Meadows says students were left “exposed to the elements” because the rapper refused to allow glass to be placed in the building’s window frames.
“In the middle of the main classroom, a skylight was left without glass inevitably allowing rain to fall directly inside, where water would soak into the floor, which would lead to a moldy smell for the next few days,” Meadows’ lawyers wrote. “The skylight was intentionally without glass because WEST expressed that he did not like glass.”
He also claims that the school had “serious wiring issues,” leading to an incident in which an electrical fire was sparked “near the student eating area where wire was laid atop the ground, exposed.” Plumbing was allegedly also a problem, including a sceptic tank that would “overflow every other day, causing a terrible smell.”
In a statement announcing the new case, attorney Ron Zambrano called the conditions at Donda Academy “absolutely egregious” and said he and his client “plan to hold them accountable.”
“The unlawful and retaliatory behavior by Mr. West and the school directors have now been documented multiple times by other former employees who never even worked together but all experienced the same horrendous treatment and witnessed the same serious health, safety and education code violations, while all were subjected to the same fate,” Zambrano said.
In technical terms, the lawsuit accuses West, Donda Academy and others of breach of contract and of violation of several California labor laws, including wage rules, wrongful termination, and improper classification.
Donda Academy did not immediately return a request for comment on the lawsuit. A representative for West individually could not immediately be located for comment.
Much like the new claims about glassless windows, the earlier case against Donda included its own allegations about conditions at the school. The former teachers claimed that students were allowed to only eat sushi; that all students were required to wear black; and, oddest of all, that students were also not allowed on the second floor because West was “reportedly afraid of stairs.”
That case, filed by the same attorneys on behalf of former teachers Cecilia Hailey, Chekarey Byers and Timanii Meeks, is still pending.
Dutch producer AFROJACK has signed with Moe Shalizi and The Shalizi Group for management. The Grammy-winning electronic artist joins a stacked dance roster that includes Alesso, Jauz and Marshmello, witih Shalizi guiding the career of the latter artist from unknown producer to global brand. “Moe Shalizi’s past work speaks for itself, excited to see where […]