Kanye West hit with copyright lawsuit from German singer who denied sample use due to rapper’s “antisemitic, racist remarks”Kanye West (Ye) is facing a copyright lawsuit from German singer Alice Merton, who alleges he used a sample of her 2022 song Blindside in his track Gun to My Head without permission.
Merton had explicitly denied West clearance, citing his antisemitic statements and refusing to be associated with him.

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Filed Monday in federal court, the lawsuit claims that Gun to My Head, a collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign and Kid Cudi, features Merton’s vocals singing the line “I sat down with a gun to my head” and loops a melody from Blindside throughout the track. Merton says she first discovered the unauthorised use when West performed the song live at a listening event in December 2023.
According to the lawsuit [via Rolling Stone], West’s team only reached out months later to request clearance – after the song had already been performed. Merton and her label refused, stating that West’s “values are contrary to our values” due to his publicly made “antisemitic, racist remarks”.
Merton, who is of Jewish descent and has family members who survived the Holocaust, says she feels “shocked and humiliated” by the unauthorised use of her work.
Even though Gun to My Head was not included on West’s 2024 album Vultures 1, it was later released as a bonus track on the digital deluxe edition of Vultures 2. Merton also claims that she received “death threats and abuse” from West’s “outraged” fans for not clearing the sample when Gun to My Head did not appear on the initial tracklist for Vultures 2.
“Although defendant’s use of plaintiff’s song could potentially bring in significant revenue, [she] was unwilling to compromise her personal beliefs and wanted not to be associated with Ye in any manner,” the suit adds.
This lawsuit is the latest in a string of legal woes West has faced regarding unauthorised sampling. Last year, the estate of Donna Summer sued West for using an unauthorised interpolation of her 1977 hit I Feel Love, in his song Good (Don’t Die), saying they “wanted no association with West’s controversial history.”
Ozzy Osbourne, too, blocked West from sampling a live version of Black Sabbat’s Iron Man for the Vultures 1 album, citing West’s antisemitic remarks as the reason for the refusal.
Last week, West surprised fans by dropping his new album Bully via X. The record has come under scrutiny for its seemingly liberal use of (possibly uncleared) samples as well, with slowed-down, reworked, or straight-up copied versions of songs like the Carpenters’ Close to You, the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love,and Can’s 1972 classic Vitamin C.
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Tomorrowland and Insomniac to host “groundbreaking” festival event, UNITY, at the Las Vegas SphereTomorrowland and Insomniac – the powerhouse creators behind some of the world’s most iconic music festivals, including Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) – have announced a brand-new festival event, UNITY, set to take place at the state-of-the-art Las Vegas Sphere from 29 to 31 August.
Billed as a “groundbreaking audiovisual spectacle,” UNITY promises a fusion of music and storytelling, brought to live by the Sphere’s cutting-edge technology.

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Attendees can expect a “meticulously curated soundtrack” that bridges dance music’s rich history with “powerful new orchestra compositions and accompaniments”, which together, culminate in an “unparalleled auditory experience”.
Each show will conclude with a surprise one-hour closing set from a “world-renowned artist,” whose identity will be revealed closer to the event.
In a joint statement, the festival creators shared their excitement: “Through the past decades, we both have strived to create festivals and experiences around the world that foster beautiful, unique communities of individuals. Music is our universal language, the dance floor our sanctuary, and every one of you, our family. We can’t thank you enough for being such an integral part of the journey with us.”
“Now, for the first time in history, our worlds become one. In UNITY, we join together to create a brand-new experience that harnesses the magic, love, and awe-inspiring moments within our events — and there’s no better stage on earth than Sphere.”
The upcoming event is also said to be the “first chapter in a series of collaborations” between the two festival creators, with more experiences to come in the future.
Presale tickets through Insomniac and Tomorrowland are available beginning Monday, 31 March at 10am PST, with the general on-sale beginning 7 April. Destination experience company Vibee is also offering a variety of presale and VIP packages from 27 March at 10am PST.

Meanwhile, Tomorrowland has just released over 20 full DJ sets from Tomorrowland Winter 2025 on YouTube. Fans can now stream performances from Afrojack, Alok, Axwell, Kölsch, Miss Monique, Steve Aoki, NERVO, Meduza, Mind Against, and many more.
For more information, visit Unity x Sphere.
The post Tomorrowland and Insomniac to host “groundbreaking” festival event, UNITY, at the Las Vegas Sphere appeared first on MusicTech.

Brazilian individual arrested after uploading 400 fake tracks to Spotify, generating 28 million plays and $65k in streaming revenueBrazilian authorities have arrested and charged an individual for uploading over 400 fake tracks to Spotify.
The tracks have generated over 28 million fake plays on the streaming service and earned the accused over $65K, according to a statement from IFPI, the non-profit organisation representing the recording industry worldwide.
The arrest was made last December by the Prosecutor’s Office of the State of Goias cybercrime unit, Cyber Gaeco, as part of a joint operation supported by IFPI, Pro-Música Brasil, and Brazilian anti-piracy body Association for the Protection of Phonographic Intellectual Rights (APDIF).

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More than $400k in assets were seized by authorities; the investigation also uncovered further copyright infringement, with 36 tracks allegedly stolen from local composers via promotional WhatsApp groups.
“These tracks, along with associated fake artist profiles, have been removed from the platform by request of the prosecutor’s office,” says IFPI.
“While not presently included in the criminal charges, the use of artificial intelligence to generate music tracks was also identified during the investigation and may be brought into the case at a later stage.”
In recent years, the use of generative AI by bad actors to mass-create content for the purpose of streaming manipulation has been a sticky issue in the music industry.
“Simply put, streaming manipulation of this nature is theft – stealing directly from artists and betraying fans,” says IFPI CEO Victoria Oakley. “We commend the actions of the State of Goiás prosecutor’s cybercrime unit for their work in this case and will continue to work closely with local authorities in Brazil, but more broadly across the world, to ensure this illegal activity is stopped.”
Paulo Rosa, President of Pro-Música Brasil, adds: “Stream manipulation is one of the biggest concerns of the music sector. We applaud the Public Attorney’s Office of the state of Goiás for this successful operation and will continue to work closely with Brazilian authorities to tackle these fraudulent practices.”
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AudioThing RES-09The RES-09 is a faithful emulation of the Roland RS-09, a lesser-known but beloved analog organ and string machine from the late '70s. Renowned for its lush ensemble effect, rich divide-down... Read More

Nvidia is reportedly in talks to acquire Lepton AINvidia is looking to get into the server rental market. The semiconductor giant is reportedly nearing a deal to acquire Lepton AI, a company that rents out servers that are powered by Nvidia’s AI chips, according to The Information. The deal is reportedly worth several hundred million dollars, according to The Information, which cited unnamed […]

Wyoming's Mark Gordon says state should issue stablecoin by JulyWyoming Governor Mark Gordon said the state’s proposed stablecoin might be ready to launch by July, with the Wyoming Stable Token Commission announcing interoperability protocol LayerZero as a partner for the token launch.Speaking at the DC Blockchain Summit on March 26, Gordon praised the speed and efficiency of the Wyoming state government in embracing blockchain technology. Anthony Apollo, the executive director of the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, also confirmed:"The Stable Token Commission has formally engaged LayerZero as our token development and distribution partner, and we have stable tokens — Wyoming stable tokens — on several test networks."Wyoming, which is represented by pro-crypto Senator Cynthia Lummis, has been planning a state-issued stablecoin for years and has a history of embracing innovation in digital assets.Governor Mark Gordon of Wyoming speaking at the 2025 DC Blockchain Summit. Source: SeiRelated: Yield-bearing stablecoins could kill banking — US Senator GillibrandWyoming Stable Token CommissionWyoming lawmakers introduced the “Wyoming Stable Token Act” in February 2022 to establish a state-issued stablecoin pegged to the value of the US dollar and redeemable for fiat.The bill was signed into law in March 2023, enabling the state treasury to develop a team of professional accountants, auditors, and technical experts to issue and manage the state’s stablecoin supply.Following the passage of the Stable Token Act, the state began staffing its Stable Token Commission with officers and executives to research and develop the state’s stablecoin.The Wyoming Stable Token Act. Source: Wyoming LegislatureIn August 2024, Governor Mark Gordon told an audience at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium that the state was eyeing a Q1 2025 launch window for the stablecoin, which would be backed by short-term US Treasury Bills and repurchase agreements.At the time, Gordon slammed the “too big to fail” ethos of US economics post-2008 financial crisis and called the Federal Reserve Bank a “drag on innovation.”More recently, Anthony Apollo, the executive director of the Wyoming Stable Token Commission, told Cointelegraph that the state's public budget should be onchain to ensure transparency, accountability, and efficiency in government spending.Magazine: Bitcoin payments are being undermined by centralized stablecoins

Love’s Arthur LeeMarch 7, 2025 was the birthday of singer/songwriter Arthur Lee. Love’s co-founder.    High Moon Records has slated for 2025 release, Just to Remind You. It’s a compilation album sourced from Arthur’s trove of tapes, recorded during the last fifteen years of his life, most of these songs are being heard here for the first time ever. Arthur asked his wife Diane Lee to issue them after his death. Having been hospitalized for several months, Lee realized he was losing his fight with Leukemia, and asked Diane to oversee the release of a final record of his unreleased songs. Although many of the tracks were in various stages of completion, Lee left some specific musical notes to execute his vision. High Moon Records previously issued Love’s Reel-To-Real and Black Beauty. Guitarist Johnny Echols is the co-founder of Love.   In 2012 and 2017, I interviewed Echols about Arthur Lee and Love, and Johnny’s memories of Love’s Forever Changes.  Portions first appeared in my books Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972 and 1967 A Complete Rock History of the Summer of Love.   HK: How did the concept of Forever Changes begin? JE: We started with kind of an idea after hearing the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers. And we decided that we wanted to do something that had horns and strings and we knew from the very start how this album was going to be. And what we were going to do and that we were going to try to make this what we would consider our magnum opus. This was gonna be the thing that defined us. And it was either we were gonna take off and just go all the way or something was gonna have to happen. We were going to really leave the three-minute pop song format. We were getting bored of the three-minute rock tune and wanted to push it. We knew with Sgt Pepper’s there was a whole new sonic thing going on. Absolutely.  “The material and concepts of an outline of it were written before we went into the studio. Arthur was not very much of a guitar player. He could play a few chords and basically would sing the songs to me and basically play the outline of them and then I would get together with Kenny mostly and we would work out some structure for the song. Bryan had a way, kind of a counter point that he would do with his finger picking that would work against what we were playing. We would always have the rehearsals with Kenny and me first and then Michael Stuart. We would rehearse with acoustical instruments, or sometimes at a friend of ours who had a house, Joe Clark. He lived in the Valley and we’d go to his place. Sometimes we would rehearse in the daytime at the Whisky. But mostly at one of our houses.  “My role with Arthur and Bryan was basically an ombudsman to kind of keep these two personalities happening. “So, I knew that from the very start to keep. Because they would have been at loggerheads all the time. Because they liked the same chicks, if you listen to some of the songs. That is rock ‘n’ roll. That’s tight, of course, but there was always that strong tension between the two of them and I was always stuck there in the middle kind of keeping the peace but also drawing the best out of them that I could. Because otherwise, you know, Bryan was very much a show tune kind of guy and I knew we could not release show tunes so we had to do a lot of work on his songs to meld then into something that was acceptable to an audience that we were developing.”  For the full interview, visit https://cavehollywood.com/loves-arthur-lee/The post Love’s Arthur Lee first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

3D-Printed Scanner Automates Deck Management for Trading Card GamersThose who indulge in trading card games know that building the best deck is the key to victory. What exactly that entails is a mystery to us muggles, but keeping track of your cards is a vital part of the process, one that this DIY card scanner (original German; English translation) seeks to automate.
At its heart, [Fraens]’ card scanner is all about paper handling, which is always an engineering task fraught with peril. Cards like those for Magic: The Gathering and other TCGs are meant to be handled by human hands, and automating the task of flipping through them presents some challenges. [Fraens] uses a pair of motorized 3D-printed rollers with O-rings to form a conveyor belt that can pull one card at a time off the bottom of a deck. An adjustable retaining roller made from the most adorable linear bearing we’ve ever seen ensures that only one card at a time is pulled from the hopper onto an imaging platen. An adjustable mount holds a smartphone to take a picture of the card, which is fed into an app that extracts all the details and categorizes the cards in the deck.
Aside from the card handling mechanism, there are some pretty slick details to this build. The first is that [Fraens] noticed that the glossy finish on some cards interfered with scanning, leading him to add a diffused LED ringlight to the rig. If an image isn’t scannable, the light goes through a process of dimming and switching colors until a good scan is achieved. Also, to avoid the need to modify the existing TCG deck management app, [Fraens] added a microphone to the control side of the scanner that listens for the sounds the app makes when it scans cards. And if Magic isn’t your thing, the basic mechanism could easily be modified to scan everything from business cards to old family photos.

Scaler Music introduce Scaler 3 Scaler 3 promises to make it easier than ever for users to take new directions, solve musical puzzles and improve their work-in-progress projects in new and interesting ways.

AI music remixing platform Hook raises $3m from Kygo’s Palm Tree Crew, The Raine Group and moreHook’s unique selling proposition is that it offers a remedy to the proliferation of unlicensed content on social media
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A. G. Cook, Charli xcx and Saltburn shortlisted for Music Producers Guild 2025 awardsThe Music Producers Guild has revealed the shortlist of nominees for the annual MPG Awards. Spanning 15 categories, including standout Self-Producing Artist, Breakthrough Producer of the Year, Original Score Recording of the Year, the awards aims to honour the year’s finest production work.
The winners will be announced at the official ceremony on the 24th April, but one winner has already been crowned. BBC Radio 6’s Lauren Laverne has been awarded the MPG Special Recognition Award for her dedication to platforming new talent.

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“I am deeply honoured to be recognised by the MPG,” the host says. “British artists and producers are among the best in the world: endlessly creative, exciting and surprising. It has been one of the greatest joys in my life to find a job that means I get to plug into that every single day and share what they do with listeners at home.”
Anu Pillai, Executive Director of the MPG, has also shared some love for Laverne. “The Music Producers Guild is delighted to honour Lauren Laverne with this year’s Special Recognition Award for her unwavering commitment to championing new music,” he says. “Lauren has continually spotlighted emerging talent and the innovative music production that is a hallmark of British musical culture.”
A further three special awards will also be awarded for Outstanding Contribution To UK Music, as well as the MPG Inspiration Award and the MPG Icon Award.
The standard 15 categories will reflect upon the excellence and innovation of the British music industry – and its certainly a talented selection of artists. A. G. Cook, who recently won Producer of the Year at the BRITs, is in the running for MPG’s Producer of the Year alongside James Ford, Marta Salogni.

Elsewhere, Danny L Harle, who The Guardian claimed was “re-inventing hard dance for a new generation”, is being pit against MNEK, Richard Turvey and Tayte Nickols for the title of Writer-Producer of the Year.
Breakthrough awards are also available for last year’s defining Producer and Engineer talents. One particular name that stands out is Japanese producer Shuta Shinoda; the producer, who has previously worked with Hot Chip, Spiritualized, and more, is up for Breakthrough Producer of the Year again. He also bagged the award in 2021.

A nod is also being given to the year’s defining Self-Producing Artist. Indie poppers Clean Cut Kid, folk-punk Frank Turner and multi-instrumental alt star The Anchoress are all in the running.
There’s also awards for Recording Engineer, Vocal Producer, Mix Engineer and Mastering Engineer of the Year. Small Commercial Studio and Large Commercial Studio of the Year awards will also be dished out.
Saltburn, Wonka and Ferrari will also battle it out to win Original Score Recording of the Year. In terms of Album of the Year, Charli xcx’s pivotal BRAT will be pit against Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ equally as marvellous Wild God, as well as Rachel Chinouriri’s instant classic, What A Devastating Turn of Events.
Tickets for the ceremony are on-sale now. The event will take place at London’s Troxy on 24th April, and will be hosted by Radio 1 DJ Sian Eleri.

The post A. G. Cook, Charli xcx and Saltburn shortlisted for Music Producers Guild 2025 awards appeared first on MusicTech.

FKA twigs joins growing list of US Visa Related Tour CancellationsFKA twigs has joined a growing list of US visa related tour cancellations, pulling North American dates of her ongoing Eusexua Tour.
The post FKA twigs joins growing list of US Visa Related Tour Cancellations appeared first on Hypebot.

Tritik releases Tymee, a FREE delay plugin for macOS and Windows
Tymee is a free, easy-to-use delay plugin and the second freebie in the Tritik lineup, alongside the Krush bit crusher. Despite the impressive-looking spectrogram, Tymee is a straightforward plugin with simple controls. The developer initially created Tymee as a tool for teaching audio programming, and that’s why the spectrogram is there, but it looks cool [...]
View post: Tritik releases Tymee, a FREE delay plugin for macOS and Windows

UK poised to Ban Predatory Ticket Resale as US drags its feetUnlike US legislators, who are dragging their feet on comprehensive reform, the UK appears poised to move forward with substantive restrictions on predatory ticket resale.
The post UK poised to Ban Predatory Ticket Resale as US drags its feet appeared first on Hypebot.

Oli Freke’s latest Synthesizer Evolution books The latest two volumes of Oli Freke’s popular Synthesizer Evolution book series shift their focus to the 21st century.