SPOTIFY ACTION:
FREE TRIAL, NEW SUIT

Good news for prospective Spotify subscribers; potentially bad news for the streamery itself. Beginning 8/22, anyone who hasn’t already tried the Premium tier can opt in on a free three-month trial, putting Spot on a level field with rival Apple Music.

Meanwhile, Eight Mile Style, the publisher of Eminem's early catalog, alleged in a suit filed on 8/21 in federal court in Nashville, that Spotify has willfully engaged in copyright infringement, shortchanging one of the service’s most-streamed artists, while also failing to comply with the terms the Music Modernization Act.

To be clear, Eminem isn’t a party to this lawsuit, and we’re told that his team was just as surprised as everyone else to see it filed. Specifically, Eight Mile has admin rights on his early catalog, which allows the pubco to do things like this on its own.

For context, Eight Mile is being repped by Nashville attorney Richard Busch, who challenged UMG a decade ago on the issue of whether digital downloads should be treated as “licenses” or “sales”—a meaningful accounting difference that changed the economics of distributing music in the iTunes era, a report in the Tennessean points out. Busch also represented Marvin Gaye’s family in its successful copyright suit over “Blurred Lines,” and he also took on Spotify in a pair of cases that alleged rampant infringement, both of which were settled.