Bill Donahue

6 days ago | billboard.com | Bill Donahue

Attorneys for Sean “Diddy” Combs asked a federal judge Thursday (April 17) to exclude the infamous 2016 surveillance video of him assaulting his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura from his upcoming sex trafficking trial, arguing it would “unfairly confuse and mislead the jury.” The headline-grabbing clip, showing Combs striking his then-girlfriend in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016, has been “altered, manipulated, sped-up, and edited to be out of sequence,” making it unusable as...

1 week ago | billboard.com | Kristin Robinson |Ed Christman |Bill Donahue |Marc Schneider

Last month, Billboard was invited to the Spotify offices in Downtown Los Angeles to meet its top editors and curators and get an inside look at how Spotify’s playlists come together, genre-by-genre. And leading that team is Sulinna Ong, global head of editorial at Spotify. Over time, Ong has held a variety of roles at companies like Live Nation, Sony BMG Music and French streaming service Deezer, before joining Spotify in 2019.

1 week ago | billboard.com | Ed Christman |Bill Donahue |Marc Schneider |Kevin Rutherford

GoldState Music has raised $500 million in financing, the private investment firm announced on Thursday. Although specific details of the funding breakdown were not disclosed, the capital infusion consists of both equity and debt, and is described in a press release as a “structured capital facility… as well as separately raised leverage,” with Northleaf Capital Partners and Ares Management leading the deal.

1 week ago | billboard.com | Bill Donahue |Marc Schneider |Kevin Rutherford |Paul Grein

Attorneys for Megan Thee Stallion say Tory Lanez must be held in contempt of court over “disruptive” and “inflammatory” behavior during a recent deposition in a civil lawsuit that they say “made a mockery of the proceedings.” In a motion filed Wednesday, lawyers for the rapper (Megan Pete) say Lanez (Daystar Peterson) – currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for shooting Megan in 2020 – behaved so poorly during the jail-house deposition that it had to be cancelled shortly after it...

1 week ago | billboard.com | Marc Schneider |Kevin Rutherford |Paul Grein |Bill Donahue

Time to squeeze in another Publishing Briefs, our semimonthly bulletin of recent signings, deals and doings in the wide world of music publishing. Since the last time we rapped, EMPIRE Publishing hired !llmind as a senior vp of A&R and elevated Al “Butter” McLean to the role of executive vp of global creative, plus Billboard‘s Kristin Robinson made sense of the Copyright Office’s inquiry into the U.S. PRO system with this explainer. Caught up?