42 Dugg’s looming legal problems have finally reached a resolution. The “U-Haul” rapper has officially been sentenced to one year in prison by a Detroit judge. Back in March, the musician pleaded guilty to prison evasion in connection with a weapons charge stemmed from his original conviction in 2010 for carjacking and felony firearms possession.

Initially, the prosecutors agreed to recommend a six-month sentence (the same length the rapper previously agreed to serve but skipped out on). However, the district court judge presiding over the case, U.S. District just William Ray II, overruled it, suggesting that the rapper could serve the maximum (five years). Now, according to the Detroit News, Dugg has formally been sentenced to one year behind bars for failing to report to jail.

In addition to the sentence, the recording artist will be required to serve three years of supervised release, pay a $20,000 fine, and refrain from using illegal drugs.

Dugg’s (real name Dion Hayes) lawyers, Drew Findling and Marissa Goldberg released a statement in the sentencing memorandum, which read, “Despite his success and aspirations, Dion has struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues,” adding, “For years, he has used substances as a means of avoiding the jarring and dichotomous realities of his life — that he is a young man who grew up in a socioeconomically depressed area, who spent most of his young life imprisoned, without family guidance or schooling, and who, against all odds, became successful.”

“With such success, Dion came to face new types of difficulties — namely, remaining clear-headed, focused, and free from external influences and bad actors. Such jarring life changes have impacted him in ways he is only beginning to understand.”

source https://uproxx.com/music/42-dugg-sentenced-to-one-year-for-failing-to-report-to-jail/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/rapper-42-dugg-has-been-sentenced-to.html

Jack Harlow is less than a year removed from his last album and only a month away from his film debut. So, perhaps that makes it a perfect time for him to announce a surprise album, Jackman, just a few days before its release.

Unlike many releases, this truly does feel like a surprise; we don’t know much about the production, features, tracklist, or themes of the album — although it might be safe to assume that Jack has a chip on his shoulder about the lukewarm reception of Come Home The Kids Miss You. His last album was perhaps a little too forward-looking for fans who haven’t quite decided that they approve of him yet, giving many fans reason to write him off.

So, don’t be surprised if he goes back to the introspective, lyrically-focused vibe of his debut, That’s What They All Say — or eschews the thoughtful songs for a more accessible, party-rap style to win fans to his side. Obviously, the most fun outcome is if he doubles down on the throwback sounds of Come Home… and brings the early 2000s all the way back. We’ll find out soon enough.

Here’s everything we know about Jackman so far.

Release Date

Jackman is out 4/28 via Atlantic.

Tracklist

No tracklist has been shared. We’ll update this space when it is.

Features

Jack hasn’t teased any features but we’ll update if/when he does.

Artwork

Singles

No single has been released yet.

Tour

If Jack is going on tour, he has yet to announce the dates. However, he does have a Las Vegas residency at Resorts World’s Zouk Nightclub from March 18 to May 27.

Jack Harlow is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

source https://uproxx.com/music/jack-harlow-new-album-jackman-release-ingo/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/jack-harlows-new-album-jackman-heres.html

Quavo has shared a few new songs since the tragic passing of his nephew and fellow Migos member Takeoff last year. This includes “Honey Bun,” “Without You,” and “Greatness,” the last of which he used to hint at the end of Migos.

Quavo also recently sat down with Chloe Bailey for Complex‘s G.O.A.T. Talk series. When he was asked to pick a “G.O.A.T. ad-lib,” he answered, “Mama,” and went on to explain why the word was often used by himself, Offset, and Takeoff when they got into trouble at home.

“The story behind the ‘mama’ ad-lib is she used to chase us up and down the house trying to whoop us,” he explained. “And we’d make sure to call her name and say, ‘I’m just playing, mama! I’m just playing, mama! I’m just playing!’

He continued, “Then when she get to you, you say, ‘Mama, mama, mama!’ Only when you in trouble is you calling her name like that.”

In March, Quavo also appeared on NBC’s music show, That’s My Jam, hosted by Jimmy Fallon. He performed a humorous cover of Lil Jon and The Eastside Boyz’s classic song “Get Low,” in which all of the track’s lyrics were changed.

Watch Quavo on the G.O.A.T. Talk series above.

source https://uproxx.com/music/quavo-origin-migos-mama-ad-lib/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/quavo-explained-origin-of-migos-mama-ad.html

Coachella continues to be the defining music festival of the year, but if you ask Diplo, when it comes to headliners, there’s something to be desired.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he said:

“I think they honestly might be having a hard time booking headliners. There’s not much left. We kind of left the era of great superhero acts, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Daft Punk. Their [2006 Coachella set] was the most epic show. Now they book acts like Bad Bunny and Blackpink, who are cool, but they’re just the most Top 40 there is. It’s almost like they’re stadium acts.

[Coachella producers Goldenvoice] have a hard time, because I think there’s not a lot of really culturally relevant new acts. I saw Labrinth. That was amazing. I think that represents real Coachella. He’s part of the zeitgeist. But the rest of it just felt like they had to scramble to find things that were cultural touchstones, but also could bring a big crowd in.”

He then noted that he’s not big on Frank Ocean (but did say he “has one of the best voices I’ve ever heard”) and speculated that “he just doesn’t really care about shows”:

“I don’t think Frank Ocean’s concert needs to be the best or worst anything. It was a show where the ice rink didn’t work and that’s all it needs to be. I didn’t see his show, because I’m not a huge fan. It’s probably a generational thing. I think I was a little older when Frank Ocean came out. I was in my 30s. He has one of the best voices I’ve ever heard. I really think he just doesn’t really care about shows. I think that’s Coachella’s fault. He doesn’t really care about his fans, to give them a concert. I don’t think it matters. He’s just a musician. Some people just don’t care.”

Diplo, meanwhile, is heading into a weekend at Stagecoach, another Goldenvoice festival.

Read the interview here.

source https://uproxx.com/pop/diplo-coachella-headliner-hard-time-booking-frank-ocean/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/diplo-is-not-huge-fan-of-frank-ocean.html

Last year, Fugees canceled their reunion tour due to legal troubles. It was reported that Pras — also known as Prakazrel “Pras” Michel — was facing a trial after being indicted in 2019 on charges of conspiracy, making a false statement, and two counts of falsifying records after making contributions to Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign on behalf of Malaysian businessman Jho Low.

Michel was accused of setting up bank accounts to help Low move money into the States, and Low was infamous for stealing $4.5 billion from Malaysia’s 1Malaysia Development Berhad sovereign wealth fund.

On Wednesday, April 26, Michel was found guilty on all 10 counts. According to the Justice Department, he faces up to 20 years in prison for the most severe counts in the case.

Michel has been charged with money laundering, campaign finance violations, acting as an unregistered agent for China, concealment and false record keeping, witness tampering, and false statements, according to Barron’s.

Leonardo DiCaprio testified for the prosecution of Low, saying, “I understood him to be a huge businessman with many different connections in Abu Dhabi, Malaysia… a sort of prodigy in the business world, incredibly successful.” Low used stolen money to fund The Wolf Of Wall Street, as well as other projects.

source https://uproxx.com/music/pras-fugees-found-guilty/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/pras-michel-of-fugees-has-been-found.html

Spotify can be used for free, but to unlock more features, music lovers can subscribe to one of the streaming services’ premium tiers. The most basic of those plans, for a single user, currently costs $9.99 per month in the US. That could change soon, though.

Yesterday (April 25), in a conference call discussing Spotify’s first quarter earnings (as Billboard notes), Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said, “I think we are ready to raise prices, I think we have the ability to do that, but it really comes down to those negotiations [with major music industry stakeholders].”

Ek also noted, “We did raise prices in 46 different locations and markets last year, and even in those markets, we were still out performing. I feel really good about our ability to raise prices over time — that we have that ability — and we have lots of data now that backs that up. We may have been marginally helped by being a lower-cost provider, but it isn’t a primary part of our strategy and it’s not something that we’re thinking about. Instead, we’re working with our label partners to work […] to figure out what’s the best opportunity to do that. And that’s a more complex trade. When the timing’s right, we will raise it.”

This comes after Spotify had about $3.3 billion in total revenue during the first quarter of 2023. That’s a 14-percent increase over 2022, but as Billboard notes, it’s “slightly lower than the company expected as macroeconomic fears crimped Spotify’s advertising business by around $20 million.”

source https://uproxx.com/music/spotify-increase-subscription-price-us-cost/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-says-platform-is.html

On the heels of his Netflix special, Baby J, John Mulaney paid a visit to Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where he talked about rehab, living with the show’s host, and making a recovery.

Upon his big comeback, Mulaney has been in Las Vegas, where he performed a few stand-up sets. On one night, Mulaney went to one of Usher’s shows, which evidently, proved to be a life-changing experience for him.

“Do whatever you have to do to go see Usher,” Mulaney said at about 9 minutes into the video. “I didn’t know the name of a single Usher song. But as I’m watching the show and hearing all these hits — hit after hit — I realized I have heard all of these songs of the past 25 years while I’m getting my haircut.”

Since the show, Mulaney revealed he’s had an “existential crisis” since attending. However, it has since inspired him to step up his craft.

“I’m in Vegas, I sell a ticket to come see me. He sells a ticket to come see him,” Mulaney says. “What you get when you go see Usher — I’m up on stage, talking about addiction — this guy, he was on roller skates at one point, singing, and dancing, and interjecting positivity. He kept pausing to go, ‘We’ve got one night, it’s all love.’ I’ve never paused my show to tell everyone ‘it’s all love,’ but maybe, I should start doing that.”

You can check out the interview above.

source https://uproxx.com/music/john-mulaney-usher-las-vegas/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/john-mulaney-insists-you-do-whatever.html

As streaming services adjust to the perils of capitalism – grow at all costs, acquire subscribers at all costs, return profits for shareholders at all costs – the media that keeps these entities profitable becomes less valued. Spotify’s mission seems to be a dominance in audio in the most general sense possible, which has only highlighted the work of its rival, Apple, which has seemingly put premium focus on creating a user-listener experience that rewards devoted fans of music. Sure, Apple Podcasts exist, and at the end of the day, Tim Cook’s sole responsibility is to keep Apple as the world-beating behemoth that it is, but the emergence of two recent incentives from the digital music pioneer has situated Apple Music as the go-to service for people who want to listen to their favorite music and discover new artists. With the arrival of Apple Music Classical and Dolby Atmos, Apple Music is drawing a line in the sand that its main initiative is to attract as many music devotees as possible. It is a powerful statement in the face of its chief rival continually getting dogged in the press for its low payouts (it’s not like Apple streams will make the average musician rich, though). Apple seems to have found an opportunity to exploit the mistakes of its competitor and built a number of apps and features that make it a truly desirable home for music fanatics.

I first began growing intrigued by Apple’s pivot towards music devotees when they introduced Dolby Atmos — also known as Spatial Audio — to wide audiences. After all, there might not be a marketing and audio initiative more antithetical to modern music consumption than the only draw being “this music sounds better.” It seemed remarkably backward-thinking from a company that was always ahead of the curve. Sure, the technology is phenomenal and fascinating, but music has become clipped, shortened, and commodified as more and more discover music via apps like TikTok and popular playlists across the major streaming platforms. While the measure of Spatial has been dictated by statistics an Apple representative has given me, it’s clear they’re making a push for it to be the go-to way for audiences to consume music on the app. According to a representative, “Since launch, the number of monthly Spatial Audio listeners has more than tripled, with more than 80% of worldwide subscribers enjoying the experience, while monthly plays in Spatial Audio have grown by over 1,000 percent. Currently, 79% of the Global Daily Top 100 are available in Spatial.”

As you can see, these statistics can mean a number of things — Apple doesn’t clarify how many of those subscribers actively seek out the experience; and almost 80% of songs being available in Spatial has more to do with their progress on the development end than the success of the program. After all, the songs are also available not in Spatial. Apple’s commitment to higher fidelity audio is an initiative with little financial gain for the company. It comes free with certain iOS updates. Between the advancement of Apple’s Spatial technology and its newest initiative, Apple Music Classical, it has become clear that Apple’s desire to dominate the music audio landscape is a boon to audiophiles everywhere.

Apple Music Classical is another free app for subscribers to Apple Music, which is remarkable considering the work it took to get the app up and running. Because of the number of recordings, versions, orchestras, and variations that accompany each piece of classical music, the SEO required for the app itself is much different than modern music. To learn more about the development of the software, I spoke with Veronica Neo, who founded Primephonic, whose mission was to “bring classical music into the digital age.” Now, with Apple’s team supporting her vision, the dream has finally become a reality. Neo, who is now head of data and operations management at Apple, explained the initiative and desire to get Apple Music Classical up and running. “We started our data process at the source, and then we did endless iterations to ensure that the catalog information we were receiving matched our classical repertoire database as much and as accurately as possible. As we discovered new works in recordings, we added these to our ever-growing classical repertoire database.”

This was a time-consuming, expensive initiative, and it’s hard to imagine Apple Music would dive into such an operation if there was little financial gain for this wing of Apple. While Atmos feels like more of a pet project, it appears as if Apple Music may have found a market inefficiency. Perhaps they’re looking to accrue a number of new subscribers who never before utilized digital streaming services. Regardless, Neo sees the app as useful for classical novices and experts alike. Much like Apple Music, the service offers tons of information and recommendations from editors.

Being a classical music novice myself, I found the app easy to navigate and informative. I am not opposed to learning more about the genre, and Apple Music Classical made the subject matter engaging. For someone curious, it’s a more than suitable introduction to the genre. “For beginners, there is a broad variety of playlists, for instance essentials per period or per genre. Browsing by instruments is a unique feature that is available on Apple Music Classical that allows listeners who know the sound of an instrument they love to get started and create their own classical music taste profile as they explore,” she explains. We also have works descriptions for many classical works that provide a much more enriching listening experience as they learn about the story of the composition.” These works descriptions are what I found so enticing, which illuminated the context and tradition around these monumental compositions.

Aficionados, too, will find the app appealing according to Neo, and I bet this is where Apple sees dollar signs. The amount of classical lovers who listen to digital music has to be minuscule, based on how long it took Apple to accumulate the proper SEO keywords to populate their catalog. It was simply a bad listening experience before the app came along. “More advanced listeners can easily go beyond the usual suspects through Composer Undiscovered Playlists and Hidden Gems. Lifelong fans can search by composer, work name, opus number, album name, artist name, or even in their local language, and find exactly their favorite recording instantly,” Neo says. “We also have Related Composers and Related Works that bring recommendations beyond what they already know.”

This is the future of Apple Music, which may not be the first name associated with streaming but has positioned itself as the music listener’s service. Its new initiatives and technological innovations are antithetical to the click and move on factory-like behavior that playlisting and algorithmic listening fosters. It’s a bold bet, and I’m not certain Apple will have patience if these programs lose money or fail to attract wide swaths of the market, but as a music devotee and someone constantly looking for a less insane way to consume music, both Spatial Audio and Apple Music Classical make it clear that I’m not the only one searching for alternatives.

source https://uproxx.com/music/apple-music-streaming-innovations-classical-dolby-atmos/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/apple-musics-innovations-are-making-it.html

The legal battle between Ed Sheeran and Marvin Gaye’s team. Yesterday (April 25) in a New York courtroom, Sheeran defended his songwriting for his 2014 single, “Thinking Out Loud,” which Gaye’s team has alleged plagiarizes his song, “Let’s Get It On.”

In 2016, the heirs of Gaye’s co-writer on “Let’s Get It On,” Ed Townsend, filed a lawsuit against Sheeran, alleging that he and Amy Wadge, the co-writer of “Thinking Out Loud,” replicated an ascending four-chord sequence, as well as a rhythm.

Per The Guardian, Sheeran appeared in court and claimed that he and Wadge wrote the song taking inspiration from the love his grandparents shared.

Ben Crump, the plaintiff’s lawyer, then referred to a video of Sheeran performing a mashup of “Thinking Out Loud” and “Let’s Get It On” during one of his shows, calling the moment “a confession” of plagiarism.

Sheeran then replied, saying, “Most pop songs can fit over most pop songs… You could go from [The Beatles’] ‘Let it Be’ to [Bob Marley’s] ‘No Woman, No Cry’ and switch back.”

He continued, “If I had done what you’re accusing me of doing, I’d be quite an idiot to stand on a stage in front of 20,000 people and do that.”

Sheeran’s lawyer, Ilene S. Farkas, also argued, saying, “The two songs share versions of a similar and unprotectable chord progression that was freely available to all songwriters.”

However, Townsend’s daughter Kathryn Griffin Townsend, who appeared as a witness in the hearing, continued to fight. She lauded Sheeran’s craft, but noted that she intends to “protect [her] father’s legacy.”

The hearings are expected to continue throughout the week.

Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

source https://uproxx.com/pop/marvin-gaye-plagiarism-case-ed-sheeran-songwriting-idiot/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/ed-sheeran-thinks-hed-have-to-be-quite.html

AI recreations of popular musicians’ voices have become a rising trend, with Drake and The Weeknd’s fake “Heart On My Sleeve” song being pulled from streaming platforms, Grimes saying she’s OK with it, and Liam Gallagher calling an Oasis AI album “mega.” Still, Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, offered his thoughts on just what this means for the future of the music industry,

“On the positive side, this could be potentially huge for creativity,” Ek said on a conference call, according to Billboard. “That should lead to more music [which] we think is great culturally, but it also benefits Spotify because the more creators we have on our service the better it is and the more opportunity we have to grow engagement and revenue.”

Earlier this year, the streaming service announced an AI DJ aspect to the app, which develops song recommendations for users based on their listening history and features narration from an AI bot.

“I’m very familiar with the scary part… the complete generative stuff or even the so-called deep fakes that pretend to be someone they’re not,” Ek added during a recent episode of Spotify’s For The Record podcast. “I choose to look at the glass as more half-full than half-empty. I think if it’s done right, these AIs will be incorporated into almost every product suite to enable creativity to be available to many more people around the world.”

Currently, Universal Music Group and the National Music Publishers’ Association are some standing against AI, as the record label released a recent statement to the publication:

“The training of generative AI using our artists’ music (which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law) as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on DSPs, begs the question as to which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation. We’re encouraged by the engagement of our platform partners on these issues – as they recognize they need to be part of the solution.”

source https://uproxx.com/music/spotify-daniel-ek-ai-huge-for-creativity/

source https://trapbeats2023.blogspot.com/2023/04/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-believes-ai-is.html