The 10 Biggest Music Law Stories of 2024: Diddy, Young Thug, Drake, AI & More

When it came to 2024’s biggest legal battles in the music industry, the stakes couldn’t have been much higher.

For Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the Department of Justice’s antitrust case posed an existential threat; for Young Thug or Lil Durk, each facing criminal cases accusing them of blurring the line between artist and gangster, a life prison sentence loomed; for Michael Jackson’s estate, court approval of the largest-ever catalog sale hung in the balance; for Miley Cyrus, allegations of infringement stalked the biggest hit of her career; for Drake, he put his reputation on the line to go to court over Kendrick Lamar’s diss track.

And none of that even approached the scale of the legal debacle facing Sean “Diddy” Combs. After decades as a chart-topping artist/producer and one of the industry’s most powerful men, the music mogul was hit with a flood of abuse allegations — first in the form of civil lawsuits, then in a stunning criminal indictment that could put him behind bars for life.

The ongoing rise of generative artificial intelligence technology like ChatGPT also continued to dominate the legal beat in 2024, as lawyers and lawmakers scrambled to deal with cutting-edge problems like deepfakes of Taylor Swift, fake vocals of the late Tupac Shakur, and large-scale use of copyrighted music to train AI platforms. Federal prosecutors got in the mix, too, bringing a first-of-its-kind indictment over a streaming fraud scheme that had used a flood of AI-generated tunes to drain millions in royalties from deserving artists.

To get up to speed on all the legal developments of the year, here are Billboard’s 10 big music law stories that struck a chord in 2024.