2020.01.02 - ΤΜΖ - Guns N' Roses Pissed At Superfan Over Leaked Music (& related articles)

Guns N' Roses Pissed At Superfan Over Leaked Music
Guns N' Roses Pissed At Fan Over Leaked Music ... Welcome To The Legal Jungle!!!

UPDATE
12:35 PM PT -- A rep for the band tells TMZ, "It is tremendously disappointing, sad, and unfortunate that a record executive involved with the band in their early years found it appropriate to auction off the unreleased materials owned by his former employer."

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A titan in the music biz is threatening a Guns N' Roses superfan with a huge lawsuit ... claiming the guy leaked a ton of the band's unreleased songs over the internet.

Here's the deal ... Guns N' Roses claims Rick Dunsford leaked 97 previously unreleased songs over the web after obtaining the recordings from a storage unit auction, and UMG -- which owns the copyrights -- is threatening to sue him for a ton of money.

UMG's legal team fired off a cease and desist letter to Rick -- obtained by TMZ -- claiming Dunsford violated an earlier settlement agreement in which UMG paid him $15k to return the recordings.

The dispute traces its roots back to when Guns N' Roses' former A&R guy Tom Zutaut auctioned off a storage unit filled with digital recordings of GNR music from 2000 and 2001.

Rick, a die-hard GNR fan, claims he and some fellow fans bought the music from the storage unit for $15,000. We're told the band's management later caught wind of the transaction, and agreed to pay Rick $15k to sell the music back to them.

Problem is ... UMG claims Rick started leaking the songs a month after he struck the deal, and now UMG is threatening him with legal action.

For his part, Rick claims someone else is leaking the tunes, and he says he told GNR management about the leaks from the jump.

It gets even worse for the superfan ... Rick's been issued a lifetime ban from Guns N' Roses shows.

We reached out to reps for the band ... so far, radio silence.

Originally Published -- 11:42 AM PT

https://www.tmz.com/2020/01/02/guns-n-roses-pissed-superfan-leaked-music-leak/

Related article in Blabbermouth, same date:
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Guns N' Roses 'Superfan' Threatened With Lawsuit Over Leaked Recordings

According to TMZ, a Guns N' Roses superfan has been threatened with a lawsuit by the band's record label over an alleged leak of nearly a hundred previously unreleased songs.

Rick Dunsford is accused by Universal Music Group (UMG) of leaking 97 tracks over the Internet after obtaining the recordings from a storage unit auction.

The label sent a cease-and-desist letter to Dunsford claiming he violated an earlier settlement agreement in which UMG paid him $15,000 to return the recordings.

The roots of the dispute can be traced back to last year when Rick came across a storage shed belonging to former Guns N' Roses A&R rep Tom Zutaut. Zutaut is the former Geffen Records executive who signed Guns N' Roses in 1986.

"About two and a half months ago, I drove to Virginia, and there was a storage locker that belonged to Tom Zutaut," Rick explained to U.S. radio personalities Greg Dwyer and Bill Michaels this past October. "He didn't pay his bills or something and it was auctioned off. The individual that bought the locker, there was about 20 CDs in this locker of unreleased Guns N' Roses music from around '99 to 2000 or 2001."

Rick and few other fans banded together and came up with the $15,000 asking price. He later insisted that he wasn't responsible for the song leaks. "I know the seller that I bought them from was continuing to sell to other individuals," he said, "and there was a massive leak. So pretty much, I've been blamed for this."

A Guns N' Roses representative told TMZ: "It is tremendously disappointing, sad, and unfortunate that a record executive involved with the band in their early years found it appropriate to auction off the unreleased materials owned by his former employer."

In 2001, Zutaut was reportedly recruited by Interscope-Geffen to help finalize Guns N' Roses' "Chinese Democracy" album, albeit without success. (The LP eventually arrived in 2008.) At one point, he even tried to persuade Axl Rose to release the album under his name, "W. Axl Rose," not Guns N' Roses.

"I really thought I could get [Axl] to deliver the record," Zutaut told Billboard in a 2018 interview. "And we got close."

https://blabbermouth.net/news/guns-n-roses-superfan-threatened-with-lawsuit-over-leaked-recordings

Twitter account of Robert Bird, the buyer of the contents of Tom Zutaut's locker, and original seller of the Village sessions, who sold separately the CD's and mp3 files of the songs to two different buyers:



https://twitter.com/StorageDiaries/status/1215640245376516096



https://twitter.com/StorageDiaries/status/1216336334735970304




https://twitter.com/StorageDiaries/status/1247918201842827266

Bird later deleted his podcasts (but I have the audio if needed).

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/Storagediaries.com/episodes/Part-1-So-you-wanna-be-a-rockstar-ea2c0s