Diddy, Young Thug, Drake, AI & More

When Drake and Kendrick Lamar were exchanging scathing diss tracks in May — culminating in Lamar’s knockout punch “Not Like Us” — nobody saw it ending in litigation. But six months later, Drake did the unthinkable: He hired lawyers and went to court over a rap beef. The allegations were leveled not against Lamar himself, but against Universal Music Group, the label that both artists have called home for the majority of their careers.

In his filings, Drake essentially accused the label of illegally prioritizing one of its top artists over another — both by using bots and payola to artificially boost the song and by allowing it to be released in the first place despite “false” claims about pedophilia. He accused the label of “using the spectacle of harm to Drake and his businesses to drive consumer hysteria and, of course, massive revenues.” All that might be true, but the litigation was quickly perceived by music fans as Drake choosing to sue because he had lost a war of words. Will that decision be worth the risk of harm to his reputation? We’ll find out in 2025.

There was no bigger legal story for the music industry in 2024 than the downfall of Sean “Diddy” Combs — a chart-topping artist and towering business figure who now stands accused of heinous sexual abuse. Starting with a blockbuster lawsuit late last year from ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura, Combs faced a steady drip of civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual assault and other forms of wrongdoing. Then the other shoe dropped in September, when he was indicted by federal prosecutors on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, accused of running a sprawling criminal enterprise aimed at satisfying his need for “sexual gratification.”

The case centers on elaborate “freak off” parties in which Combs and others would allegedly ply victims with drugs and then coerce them into having sex, as well as on alleged acts of violence to keep victims silent. After being refused bail multiple times, Diddy is set for a trial in May 2025; if convicted on all the charges, he could face a potential life prison sentence.

Two years after the rapper Quando Rondo was ambushed by gunmen at a Los Angeles gas station, federal prosecutors charged Chicago drill star Lil Durk (Durk Banks) in October with ordering the attack — a stunning accusation for a superstar rapper who had reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 a year earlier. After prosecutors say Durk put out a “bounty” on Rondo as revenge for the 2020 killing of fellow Chicago rapper and close friend King Von, they claim a Durk-linked credit card was used to fly the attackers to carry out the deed — from which Rondo escaped but his cousin was killed.

Like the case against Young Thug and his group YSL two years earlier, the new case claims Durk and his “Only The Family” crew blurred the lines between hyper-realistic lyrics and actual criminal violence: “OTF is a hybrid organization that functions as a Banks-led music collective and a gang.” And like the YSL case, they’re already citing Durk’s lyrics to help make that case against him.

When the U.S. Department of Justice filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit in May aimed at breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, it was hardly the first time the concert giant was labeled a “monopoly.” Ever since the companies merged in 2010, they’ve faced criticism over their huge market share in the world of live music — and that scrutiny dramatically increased after the disastrous 2022 rollout of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

In taking those claims to court, the feds alleged Live Nation had subjected the live music industry to an illegal “flywheel” — reaping revenue from ticket buyers, using it to sign artists, then leveraging that repertoire to lock venues into exclusive ticketing contracts that yield ever more revenue. “It is time to break it up,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time. Live Nation, meanwhile, is fighting back — arguing that the DOJ’s lawsuit is “disingenuous” and “distracts from real solutions that would decrease prices and protect fans.”

The booming growth of artificial intelligence continued to dominate the music law landscape in 2024. In January, a flood of sexually-explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift were uploaded to X (formerly Twitter) — an ugly incident that highlighted a lack of remedies for such AI-powered fakery. In June, the three majors filed lawsuits claiming that market-leading AI music firms Suno and Udio had infringed copyrighted music on an “unimaginable scale” to train their models.

That case, which the AI firms have argued is an abuse of intellectual property, is the music industry chapter of a broader legal struggle over whether such training constitutes copyright “fair use” — a literal trillion-dollar question that will take years to definitively answer. Elsewhere on the AI legal beat in 2024: Tupac Shakur’s estate threatened to sue Drake for AI cloning the late rapper’s voice; Tennessee enacted a new law banning such voice mimicry; and federal lawmakers introduced similar legislation that would do so on a national level.

More than 15 years after Michael Jackson’s death, his estate is still pending in probate court — and its attorneys saw plenty of courtroom action in 2024 surrounding Sony’s massive $600 million deal to buy half his music catalog. In March, the late star’s son Blanket asked the judge to stop his grandmother (Katherine Jackson) from using estate money to fund her ongoing efforts to block the deal — a request later seconded by the estate itself with filings that said she had already received more than $55 million since the singer’s death. Then in August, a California appeals court issued a final decision rejecting Katherine’s objections and allowing the sale to move forward, ruling that Michael’s will had vested his executors with “full power and authority” to ink such transactions.

And just like that, it was over. More than two years after Grammy-winning rapper Young Thug was arrested as part of a sweeping Atlanta gang case, pitting prosecutors in America’s rap capital against one of hip-hop’s biggest stars, he pleaded guilty in October and was sentenced to serve just 15 years’ probation with no prison time — a stunning end to a legal saga that rocked the music industry.

A chart-topping rapper who helped shape the sound of hip-hop in the 2010s, Thug stood accused of being the kingpin of a violent gang that had wrought “havoc” on the Atlanta area for nearly a decade. But the case was a mess from the start, featuring endless witness lists, procedural missteps, a jailhouse stabbing and a bizarre episode that saw a judge removed from the case. After yet another irregularity sparked calls for a mistrial, Thug’s attorneys saw their chance to simply plead guilty and hope the judge would set him free — a gamble that paid off.

One of the biggest songs of 2023 was the subject of one of the biggest copyright lawsuits of 2024. In a September complaint, Miley Cyrus was accused of stealing key elements of her chart-topping “Flowers” from Bruno Mars’ “When I Was Your Man” — an interesting claim, since the Cyrus track was clearly an “answer song” that overtly responded to the lyrics in the Mars song (fans speculated it was because “Your Man” was a favorite of her ex-husband Liam Hemsworth).

Does that kind of lyrical riffing amount to infringement? Experts aren’t so sure. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that the case against Cyrus was filed not by Mars himself, but by a financial firm called Tempo Music Investments that bought out the rights of one of his co-writers. In her first response to the case in November, Cyrus argued that the total lack of involvement from Mars and two other co-writers was a “fatal flaw” that required the outright dismissal of the lawsuit. Stay tuned in 2025 to see how the judge feels about that argument.

Amid a contentious presidential election, a slew of artists spoke out against Republican candidate Donald Trump using their music during his 2024 campaign. Beyoncé, Celine Dion, the Foo Fighters, ABBA and Sinead O’Connor’s estate all criticized the former president’s use of their songs. The White Stripes went further, filing a copyright lawsuit claiming that Trump used “Seven Nation Army” in a social media video without permission. The estate of Isaac Hayes did the same, suing over Trump’s alleged use of the late singer’s “Hold On, I’m Coming” at rallies and in videos. 

After years of industry complaints about streaming fraud — the use of bots or other means to artificially boost traffic for certain songs — federal prosecutors finally took action in September. In a first-of-its-kind indictment, the feds accused a North Carolina musician named Michael Smith of stealing $10 million in streaming royalties as part of a “brazen fraud scheme.”

The charges claim that Smith created thousands of fake songs, then used an army of bots to play them billions of times on Spotify and other streamers. When he couldn’t create enough fake tracks to make the scam work, Smith allegedly turned to artificial intelligence, partnering with an unnamed A.I. music firm to produce grist for his mill and funneling money back in the form of percentage cuts.

The case is a big deal, because streaming fraud isn’t just stealing fractions of a penny from faceless tech giants; since royalties are calculated as a percentage of a finite pie, every phony stream represents real money being diverted away from real artists.