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In a suit filed Wednesday in federal court in Nashville, Eight Mile accuses Spotify of willful copyright infringement by reproducing “Lose Yourself” and about 250 of the rapper’s songs on its service to the tune of potentially billions of dollars in alleged damages. The suit also targets the Music Modernization Act, a federal law enacted last October that was intended to make life easier for tech companies and to get songwriters paid.

Source: Eminem Publisher Sues Spotify Claiming Massive Copyright Breach, “Unconstitutional” Law

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved a second blockchain company’s request to sell its tokens to the public on July 11, a day after breaking ground by greenlighting its first public cryptocurrency sale. The SEC’s approval of live streaming platform YouNow’s Props token offering falls under Reg A+, which allows startups to raise up to $50 million in a public offering with fewer disclosures than a full IPO requires.

Source: SEC doubles down, approving a second blockchain token offering in less than 24 hours | Modern Consensus.

YouTube has revamped its manual copyright claim system, which now requires copyright owners to provide time-stamps indicating where their content appears in videos without the proper license. The updates, announced by project manager Julian Bill in a blog post, are intended to ease confusion around the manual claim system and make it easier for creators to remove infringing content associated with claims.

Source: YouTube Revamps Its Copyright Claim System

From Apple to Disney to AT&T, most of the major players who are on the guest list this week at the tony C-suite conclave are making huge investments in storytelling for a new era of streaming on-demand platforms. “The arms race for writers and how do you compete in this new changing world — that’s what I want to hear about,” said one longtime conference attendee who expects the streaming wars to dominate conversation this week.

Source: Sun Valley 2019: Content Arms Race, Streaming Wars Take Center Stage After a Turbulent Year

Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ is both a chart-topping phenomenon and a turning point for the music business. The 20-year-old rapper was a virtually unknown Tweetdecker when “Old Town Road” was embraced by TikTok influencers as the background music to something called the “Yeehaw challenge,” where users transformed into cowboys at the drop of a beat. In the three months since, their collaboration shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, where it has spent 12 weeks.

Source: Memes Are the New Pop Stars: How TikTok Became the Future of the Music Industry

In the new report, Music Canada — which represents the major record companies in Canada and works to support and develop the music sector — is calling for the Canadian government to “rebalance the music marketplace and restore fairness to the creators of music,” it states in the press release that came out after the event.

Source: ‘The Creative Middle Class Is Being Annihilated’: Music Canada’s New Report Calls for Closing the Value Gap

As technology develops to the point where AI is capable of creating original music, questions are being raised as to whether this computer generated music, and the people behind the code that make it possible, should be granted the same legal protections as more traditionally created music.

Source: Should Copyright Protect Music Created By Artificial Intelligence?

Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there’s no need to verify the accuracy of a song’s metadata before it gets released, and there’s no one place where music metadata is stored.

Source: Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry