LOn the hip-hop side of things, Jay-Z opened his L.A. run at SoFi with Blue Ivy, John Legend, DJ Khaled, and Scarface.
CThat guest list is a flex. Blue Ivy's been stealing these shows lately, and Scarface is the one everyone forgets is a legend.
LHe's the guy the real heads show up for. You want to know who Jay respects? He put Scarface in an L.A. stadium.
CThat's a statement. Night one at SoFi and he's already setting the bar.
LSpeaking of statements, the Elvis Presley estate is suing Anthropic, claiming they used the King's music to train their AI.
COkay, I need everyone to understand what Anthropic is. It's the company behind Claude, the AI assistant. This is the Elvis estate saying an AI company fed it 'Hound Dog' without permission.
LThey say they're 'deeply protective of these iconic songs'. And look, they should be. If AI is ingesting the entire history of recorded music, someone has to pay for that.
CNo, no, wait. Let's be clear about what training actually is. It doesn't copy the song and spit it back out. It learns patterns from megabytes of data.
LI don't care what the technical definition is, Claudette. These companies took Elvis Presley's voice, his actual recordings, and used them to build a product.
CThey're not selling Elvis Presley songs. That's the whole point of the lawsuit, and it's going to hinge on whether training is copying.
LIf I fed your columns into a machine and charged people to generate articles in your style, you'd want a check.
CI'd want a byline. But that's not what this is. We're making a legal distinction here between inspiration and theft, and the music industry has been blurring that line for decades.
LThe estate has a right to protect its catalog. That's their job. If the AI companies win, every single artist from Elvis onward needs to call their lawyer.
CMy take: training could reasonably be argued as fair use. The outputs are the problem. If Claude starts writing a new Elvis song that never existed, that's when the estate has a real case.
LAnd I think the horse is out of the barn. These models already ingested it. You can't untrain it. So the lawsuit is about who gets paid going forward.
CThat's the part we agree on. This is really about the business model. Spotify paid fractions of a cent per stream; AI companies think they should pay nothing.
LAnd to be fair to the Elvis estate, they've been aggressive about this before. They went after bootlegs, they've gone after tribute acts. They don't let it go.
CWhich means Anthropic is about to learn what it's like to deal with lawyers who've been protecting a dead man's catalogue for forty years. Good luck to them.
LNow let's talk about the guessing game taking over the timeline: fans trying to identify a row of album covers from a snippet.
COh, this is the one where you see little slivers of covers and everyone loses their mind. One fan, Cookie Monsta, threw out Beyoncé, Rihanna or Shakira, Sabrina, Charli, Ariana, Olivia, Tate, Taylor, and Benson Boone.
LThat's not a guess, that's a Spotify Wrapped wish list. You can't just name every person you've ever streamed.
CAnother one, Jean, saw some of the same and said 'I mean, the album cover is there' for Sabrina, and Olivia's logo is apparently visible.
LSo the real debate isn't whether these covers exist; it's whether the feature is real or someone made a mockup to farm engagement.
CClassic. And you know what? I respect the hustle. Post a blurry image of eleven squares and watch the timeline explode.
LIt's the cheapest form of hype since the 'breaking news' tweet with no link. I'll believe it when I see the final answer key.
CUntil then, every fanbase is out here arguing that their fave is definitely in the grid. Shoutout to the Tate McRae and Benson Boone defenders.
LThey're fighting for their lives over four pixels of what might be a gradient. This is why we can't have nice things.