Eric Jackson
@ericjackson • 172,873 subscribers
Finding the next 100-baggers | Hedge Fund Manager @emjcapital | @EMJXai $SRXH | Founder @EventHorizonIQ | Columbia PhD | Finance, Music & Culture
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Drake's being sued over "Janice STFU." Here's what caught my eye. The plaintiff says he set out to reimagine Lykke Li's "I Follow Rivers." But all 3 writers of that song are already listed as writers of Drake's song. The real fight is over what he added, and whether Drake's side heard it before the song was made. I read the federal complaint. New video.
Eric Jackson52,763 views • 2 days ago
DRAKE HAS PHARRELL'S $725,000 CHAIN. 28 months later, it sold for $243,750. Same object. Same auction house. Down 66.4%. The first buyer was Kid Cudi. The 2025 buyer is reported as Drake. Then I pulled the SEC filing behind Pharrell's Joopiter. The jewelry isn't the most interesting part.
Eric Jackson656,587 views • 22 days ago
50 Cent's company leased a city-owned film studio in Shreveport for $200 a month. The 2024 lease is 37 pages. With notice by November 1, his company can walk away at the end of any year, with no liability to the city for leaving. If the city ever wants to accept an offer for the building, his company gets first refusal, usable from late 2032 while a federal mortgage remains. G-Unit pays the running costs. In May, the city council voted to extend the lease to 99 years. I haven't seen the amendment's terms. Starz canceled BMF.
Eric Jackson72,698 views • 3 days ago
Mark Walter has to take roughly $20 billion of loans off his insurers by December 31. There are 4 ways to do that. Sell the loans: nobody buys paper under a grand jury subpoena. Grow: the company has to be 4 times bigger in 2 quarters. Reinsure: the good assets leave, the loans stay, the ratio goes UP. Sell things and repay in cash. The Lakers covered about a third.
Eric Jackson2,237,029 views • 2 months ago
Everybody has a theory about why André 3000 stopped making rap records. Nobody has a theory about this one, because as far as I can tell nobody reported it. Recordation V9991D471, recorded 15 July 2021. First party, verbatim: Andre Lauren Benjamin, professionally known as Andre 3000, individually and dba Gnat Booty Music, and Wedontplayevenwhenwebeplayin LLC. Second party: Primary Wave Music IP Fund 3. Roughly 570 compositions. It is publishing rather than masters, and the document is 33 pages for 570 titles, which means it is a short form sitting on top of a long form nobody recorded. The share he actually assigned is not stated anywhere I can see. Now search the other man. Antwan Patton returns 511 hits and 150 recordations, and he is a party to none of them. Every hit is his name appearing as a writer inside somebody else's paperwork. Recording a transfer is optional and plenty of deals never get filed, so the only sentence I can support is that no recorded transfer names him. One of them shows up in the register as a seller. The other shows up only as a name inside other people's documents. Which raises the obvious question: André sold publishing, so why not the records. Because the records were never his to sell. SR0000340520, registered 6 October 2003. Claimant: "© ℗ Arista Records, Inc. (employer for hire)." Two solo albums, two number one singles, one registration. There is no separate registration for The Love Below anywhere. I looked. A sound recording registration follows the claimant's unit of commerce. Arista sold one product, so Arista registered one work. What makes it worth showing you is that the register was perfectly willing to give this catalog two numbers when it wanted to. Stankonia has two registrations. Aquemini has two. Go look at what separates each pair, and it is a profanity. Watch the claimant line move across the catalog. ATLiens 1997, LaFace. Aquemini 1999, Arista, with LaFace named as employer for hire inside the authorship line. Stankonia 2001, back to La Face. The double album 2003, Arista Records Incorporated. The singles in 2004, BMG Music. Idlewild 2006, LaFace Records LLC. Six filings, five versions of the same corporate family, and one thing that never changes. Employer for hire is on every single one. Across every sound recording OutKast ever released, Antwan Patton and André Benjamin appear as claimant exactly zero times. One filing is not like the others. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik came out in April 1994. It was not registered as a sound recording until 2 February 2018. Twenty four years. And the claimant on that 2018 filing is Arista Records Incorporated, which is strange, because Arista had assigned the whole thing to Sony 9 years earlier. The address on the form is 25 Madison Avenue, 22nd floor, New York, which is Sony's building. Here is how it got to Sony. Recordations V3582D733 and 734, filed 3 September 2009. First party Arista Records LLC, second party Sony Music Entertainment, executed as of 27 December 2008. 734 pages, 1,702 titles. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is one row in that schedule. The next day, a second document, LaFace Records LLC to Sony, 67 titles, carrying ATLiens. Both executed as of the same December day, because that is a corporate closing date rather than anything to do with music. Last thing, and it is live right now. Section 203 lets an author terminate a grant 35 years on and take the work back. It is how Victor Willis got the Village People songs. Termination notices filed under OutKast, André Benjamin, Antwan Patton: zero. Before you decide that means nothing, I checked whether the system would show me one if it existed. Victor Willis returns 10. LaFace Records returns 3. One of those 3 is Usher. He served his notice on 23 June 2025, on Sony, as successor to LaFace. Same label. Same era. Same successor company. He filed. They have not. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik turns 35 in 2029. Every document above is free and public.
Eric Jackson1,219,393 views • 1 month ago
Jack Dorsey bought Jay-Z's Tidal for $297M. Everyone knows that number. The SEC filing says he paid $233M. For 86.8% of a company worth less than half its 2017 price. 16 artists launched it as "owners." The paperwork names exactly 1 of them, and gives him a board seat. A press release is not a filing. 🧵
Eric Jackson1,418,779 views • 2 months ago
The Army knew about the fire. Then the wind changed. Four soldiers died at CFB Wainwright. Environment Canada wrote the turn down at 5 a.m.— hashed records prove it. The internal memo called the change "unexpected." Asked on TV whether training should have proceeded, the CDS deferred to the investigations. The full EventHorizonIQ Research investigation:
Eric Jackson11,704 views • 1 day ago
Everyone says Bad Bunny owns his masters. I pulled the Copyright Office registrations. The author on the sound recordings is Rimas Entertainment, LLC — status: "employer for hire." Work made for hire means there is no 35-year termination right. The clock never starts. Day 351:
Eric Jackson709,824 views • 2 months ago
Taylor Swift said Scooter Braun wanted to silence her with an NDA that would only let her say positive things about him. But the published NDA draft tells a different story. And an email from Taylor's OWN lawyer reveals something even more surprising. I went through the documents. Here's what I found. 👇
Eric Jackson32,214 views • 4 days ago
A well-known music industry lawyer asked me: Has Jay-Z ever made any of his partners money? He has made money himself. So I read what his counterparties filed. Block booked $237.3M for TIDAL. It has recognized $266.1M of impairments. Iconix paid $204M for Rocawear, then was delisted at $3.15. Roc Nation handed back exactly half its stake in The Parent Company. None of that proves Jay-Z caused those outcomes. Iconix had dozens of brands and its own problems, the California cannabis market collapsed industry-wide, and Block cited its own strategic changes. Most of Jay-Z’s businesses are private and file nothing, so this is only the part others were required to disclose. New video:
Eric Jackson77,915 views • 13 days ago
2007: 50 Cent said Def Jam would "probably do everything within their powers" for Kanye. 2020, his book: Jay "did everything under the sun to make sure he could beat me through Kanye." 2026, on Flagrant: Jay-Z "pushed the button at Def Jam while he's the president. And it was the right move." AP, Sept 18, 2007: Interscope and Def Jam were both divisions of Universal Music Group.
Eric Jackson28,380 views • 5 days ago
One bar on Drake's "Quebec" sounds like a joke about a car: "Phantom at the crib, it must be haunted in here." Drake once rented a Phantom for $5,000 a month to look successful before he was, and drove it "to Montreal for my first show ever." His manager later gave him that same car. He owns more than one Phantom, so the link is my read. Then "Two-one-three, add that up": 213 is LA, it adds to 6, Toronto, and "twist the 6ix" takes you back to his 2016 song "9." Then Ibiza in one bar, and amnesia in the next. Amnesia is an Ibiza club, and it's what a night there does to you.
Eric Jackson45,115 views • 10 days ago
Salt-N-Pepa lost their masters case in January. I listened to all 29 minutes of their appeal. A federal judge asked Universal's lawyer: If Salt-N-Pepa never granted these copyrights, how does your client own them? His eventual response: “I take your point on the 2 pre-existing albums.” That is NOT a ruling. The same judge later pushed Salt-N-Pepa's lawyer hard on work-for-hire. So I pulled the registrations, termination notices and court documents. Then I found the Beastie Boys.
Eric Jackson87,409 views • 23 days ago
Jay-Z is a credited songwriter on Drake's new song. Solar Eclipse lists 13 writers, including Drake, Don Toliver and Shawn Carter. Six of the credits connect to Bun B's Get Throwed from 2005. Meanwhile, some said DJ Akademiks reported that Drake surrendered publishing income. But songwriter credits don't establish the actual royalty split. I traced the music rights through Sony Music Publishing, Domain Capital Group and Universal. Here's what the documents prove, and where they stop.
Eric Jackson43,995 views • 12 days ago
Someone asked how Rick Ross has money with "one hit twenty years ago." I pulled the documents. ⭐ His album *Set in Stone* debuted at No. 39 with ~2,000 pure sales. His catalog does **3,587,654 Spotify streams a day**, ~1.3B a year, with no release required. ⭐ I searched the federal copyright register for him selling that catalog. 127 mortgage security agreements carry his name. I opened the parents: **every one belongs to somebody else.** Lil Wayne's assignment of 1,018 works to a trust. Kanye's chain. Nicki Minaj's. He's in them as a co-writer. **There is no recorded sale of a Rick Ross catalog anywhere in that database.** ⚠️ But "never sold it" is not "kept it." The recording registrations name **Island Def Jam / UMG** (Teflon Don, Port of Miami) and **Sony** (Port of Miami 2) as claimant. What the register shows him holding is the publishing and the name. ⭐ Where it actually comes from, four databases deep: · catalog annuity, 595 tracks · **Boss Wings Enterprises: 244 workers across 5 Wing Stop locations** per a 2022 DOL action. Wingstop 10-K AUV: $2.0M/store · a ticketed car show on his own land, 5th year, its own Florida corporation · fee dates: theaters, casinos, an HBCU homecoming, a symphony show, a cruise ⭐ And the question under the question. *Ross v. Roberts*, 222 677 (2013): summary judgment affirmed, transformative use, First Amendment protected. **The name is property and a court said so.** What I could NOT verify: the county parcel record, any store count, and any attendance figure in either direction.
Eric Jackson183,439 views • 1 month ago
SpaceX started trading today. Everyone's covering the pop, the trillion-eight valuation, the trillionaire watch. The number that matters: they reserved 20-30% for retail investors. Normal is 5-10. And they walked away from $175B in demand to do it. The biggest IPO in history wasn't a fundraise. Day 297:
Eric Jackson388,403 views • 4 months ago