A studio engineer who used to work for Eminem has been charged with stealing the Detroit rapper’s unreleased music and selling it online.
The man accused is one Joseph Strange of Holly, Michigan who has been charged with copyright infringement and interstate transportation of stolen goods. Strange worked at Eminem’s studio in Ferndale, Detroit until 2021 when he lost his job. If convicted he could be looking at up to 15 years in jail.
At least 25 tracks are alleged to have been stolen. The theft was reported to the FBI in January when studio employees were alerted to the fact that some of Eminem’s unreleased music was already up on Reddit and Youtube.
A review found that files were transferred from a hard drive that had been in a safe to another external hard drive sometime between October 2019 and January 2020, a period when Strange was employed by the studio.
Then a Canadian resident with the screen name ‘Doja Rat’ told FBI investigators that he had purchased 25 songs from Strange for around $50,000 in Bitcoin, a frankly staggering amount for what were/are sound files. The Canadian has also revealed that Strange had offered him some of Eminem’s handwritten lyrics.
There is also, apparently, another group of fans, organised by someone with the screen name ATL who have purchased a “couple” of songs from Strange for the princely sum of $1,000.
Strange’s attorney Wade Fink has issued a statement defending his client, saying he is a married father of two with “decades of dedication to the music industry.”
Fink described the charges as “untested”, adding that: “We will handle the matter in a courtroom and we have great faith in the judges of our district.”
