What’s Behind the Legal Standoff Between Prince’s Estate and Morris Day & the Time?

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorSpotify, which suspended its paid subscription service in Russia earlier this month due to that country’s unprovoked and bloody invasion of Ukraine, has announced it will “fully suspend our service in Russia,” apparently indefinitely. It joins dozens of other music companies that have ceased operations in the country.“Spotify has continued to believe that it’s critically important to try to keep our service operational in Russia to provide trusted, independent news and information in the region.

LOS ANGELES -- James Bond didn’t get an Oscar nomination this year, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t be part of the ceremony.It’s the 60th anniversary of the first 007 movie, after all, and the 50th anniversary of “The Godfather” and those landmarks will not go uncelebrated Sunday at the 94th Oscars.“We have some surprises around that. Wink, wink,” Will Packer, who is producing the show, said Thursday.It’s all part of the overriding theme of the year: “Movie lovers unite.”“Movies are the one thing that actually do unite so many of us as a global community,” Packer said.

K.J. Yossman The Production Guild of Great Britain (PGGB) has found its first ever royal patron in Prince Edward, also known as the Earl of Wessex.To mark the appointment, Prince Edward met with some of the production crew at Twickenham Film Studios in West London, where films including “The Italian Job” and “Blade Runner” have been shot.Among those Prince Edward met were Oscar-winning sound editor Tim Cavagin (“Bohemian Rhapsody”).Prince Edward has always taken an interest in the arts and before becoming a full-time working royal in 2002 worked in both theater and television, even running his own television production company, Ardent Productions, which made films including “Edward on Edward.” The PGGB represents professionals in film and television drama production including accounting, locations, assistant directing, post-production and VFX.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorKanye West has been barred from performing at the Grammy Awards due to his “concerning online behavior,” a rep for the artist confirms to Variety. Reps for the Recording Academy, which presents the Grammys, did not immediately respond to Variety‘s requests for comment on the claim early Saturday.West’s rep cited a report in the Blast posted late Friday claiming that the artist’s team received a phone call Friday night informing him he had been “unfortunately” removed from the lineup of performers for the show due to his “concerning online behavior.” While West was not among the first list of performers, which was announced on Tuesday, he may have been a planned performer.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorThe Oscars will feature an unusual all-star band starring Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, legendary singer-percussionist Sheila E. and iconic jazz pianist Robert Glasper along with musical director Adam Blackstone, show producers Will Packer and Shayla Cowan announced. The Oscars air live on ABC and broadcast outlets worldwide on Sunday, March 27, 2022, at 8 p.m.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorNearly five years after the release of their last album, “Everything Now,” the sixth studio album by Arcade Fire, has been confirmed for a May 6, 2022 release via Columbia Records.Titled ‘We,’ the album’s arrival is preceded by first single “The Lightning I, II,” and as a video directed by Emily Kai Bock, which can be seen below.Produced by longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich with the group’s Win Butler and & Régine Chassagne, and recorded in multiple locales including New Orleans, El Paso and Mount Desert Island, the album “paradoxically distills ‘the longest we’ve ever spent writing, uninterrupted, probably ever’ (per the band’s Win Butler) into a concise 40 minute epic – one as much about the forces that threaten to pull us away from the people we love, as it is inspired by the urgent need to overcome them,” the announcement reads.

Following Dame Shirley Bassey onto the stage after her performance of Diamonds Are Forever at the BAFTA Film Awards, Rebel Wilson entered to the strains of the Bond theme wearing a shimmering hot pink dress, complete with 80s-style padded shoulders.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorSlimkid3, Imani and Fatlip of the Pharcyde were never supposed to rap together again. After producing two classic ‘90s hip-hop albums — “Bizarre Ride: The Pharcyde” and “Labcabincalifornia” — the galvanizing West Coast hip-hop group crumbled and went their separate ways.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorThe family of legendary singer-songwriter Nat King Cole, one of the most important and influential musicians of the 20 th century, has entered into an agreement with Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group to manage and expand his legacy to new generations, the company announced today.Details of the transaction were not disclosed, beyond the fact that it “encompasses a broad range of rights from Cole’s legendary career including his recorded music, publishing, television shows, and name and likeness.”In the decades before his 1965 death from lung cancer at the age of just 45, Cole scored more than 150 singles across Billboard’s pop, R&B, and country charts and has sold an estimated 50 million-plus records worldwide. While best known as a crooner, he was a formidable jazz musician as well, and is best known for classics like “The Very Thought of You,” “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” “Unforgettable,” “Nature Boy,” “Stardust,” “When I Fall In Love,” “Mona Lisa,” “L-O-V-E,” and the holiday staple, “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire).” As the announcement notes, Cole, who was born in Alabama in 1919, was subjected to all the barriers of the Jim Crow era, yet his success played no small role in advancing Black Americans’ presence in entertainment and public perception.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorMegan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa are a formidable team, and award-winning video director Dave Meyers plays to their strengths in the clip for the pair’s new tag-team single, “Sweetest Pie.” Working a similar theme to the one from his video for Saweetie and Doja Cat’s “Best Friend” — hapless explorers of a science-fiction world stumble upon female characters with superpowers — this one turns dark quickly, as the explorers decide Megan and Dua are witches, try to burn them at the stake, and then suffer the consequences of their arrogance. Sure, it’s a not-terribly-serious, special-effect-filled music video, but it’s still a satisfying perspective during Women’s History Month.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorIt’s almost become a model in recent years: If a song’s a hit, the copyright-infringement lawsuits follow, and Dua Lipa was clobbered with two of them in four days last week. Her global hit “Levitating,” which has spent 68 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, has drawn two lawsuits from songwriters claiming the song infringes on their compositions, according to multiple media reports.The first was filed March 1 by a Florida reggae group called Artikal Sound System, claiming that Lipa’s song lifts from their relatively obscure 2017 track, “Live Your Life.” That complaint includes little specific detail beyond claiming that the two tracks are so similar that it was “highly unlikely that ‘Levitating’ was created independently.” In the second, more-detailed legal complaint, filed on March 4 in New York, songwriters L.

J. Kim Murphy The 2022 box office has its first juggernaut. After years of promotion and more than few delays due to COVID-19, “The Batman” finally hit movie theaters this weekend.

Prince‘s estate has responded after the singer Morris Day claimed that he has been prohibited from using the band name The Time by the estate.Day, who regularly collaborated with Prince and still fronts The Time, issued a statement yesterday (March 3) which accused the late musician’s estate of blocking him from using the name Morris Day & the Time “in any capacity”.“I’ve given 40 years of my life building up a name and legacy that Prince and I came up with,” Day wrote in a statement on Instagram. “A name that while he was alive, he had no problem with me using.

the Morris Day & The Time Facebook account.“However, now that Prince is no longer with us – Suddenly, the people who control his multimillion dollar estate, want to rewrite history by taking my name away from me, thus impacting how I feed my family. So as of now, per the Prince estate, I can no longer use Morris Day & The Time in any capacity,” Day said.Representatives for Prince’s estate contested Day’s characterization of the matter, however.

Prince is no longer with us, suddenly, the people who control his multi million dollar estate want to rewrite history by taking my name away from me, thus impacting how i feed my family. So as of now, per the Prince Estate, [I] can no longer use Morris Day & The Time in any capacity,” according to the post.A representative for the estate disputed Day’s post. “Given Prince’s longstanding history with Morris Day and what the Estate thought were amicable discussions, The Prince Estate was surprised and disappointed to see his recent post.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorMorris Day, frontman of Prince-spawned funk group the Time for more than 40 years, has laid into his late benefactor’s estate, which he claims have told him he can no longer work under the name Morris Day & the Time.“I’ve given 40 years of my life building up a name and legacy that Prince and I came up with,” he wrote in a social media post. “A name that while he was alive, he had no problem with me using.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorAfter what we’ve all been through in the past two years, every concert feels like a miracle, but a Dua Lipa show more than most. On the surface it might be easy to underestimate the heavy emotions associated with her “Future Nostalgia” album, which was famously released on March 27, 2020, just as the horrors of the pandemic were becoming clear: It’s a dance-party album that arrived at seemingly one of the worst possible times in human history for a dance party album, when there were no parties and the only dancing was done on our own.Yet instead of striking a sour note or seeming like a cruel taunt, it was many people’s escape, their comfort food, their crying blanket — a reminder not only of what we couldn’t have, but what we hoped to get back as everyone wondered, without exaggeration, when or if we’d ever be at a concert or on a crowded dancefloor again.