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Can Suge Knight make money from Nick Cannon’s Eminem diss track?

 		Can Suge Knight make money from Nick Cannon’s Eminem diss track?

Nick Cannon gave new legs to an old feud this week when he released a full-length diss track, “The Invitation,” in response to a verse Eminem recorded on Fat Joe’s “Lord Above.”

Em’s verse was in reference to a story Cannon, 39, told in September in which he said that he wanted to confront the Detroit rapper, 47, over a slight against Cannon’s then-wife, Mariah Carey: Eminem’s 2009 track “The Warning,” which he recorded to counter Carey’s song “Obsessed” — obliquely about Em’s public claims that he and Carey had a relationship.

In the new track, Cannon features vocal interludes from Marion “Suge” Knight in its intro and outro, which he apparently recorded from prison, where he is serving a 28-year sentence for the 2015 hit-and-run death of a man on the set of the movie “Straight Outta Compton.”

Kurt Dahl, of Vancouver law firm Murphy & Company, who writes about the legal side of the music business on his blog LawyerDrummer, told Page Six on Tuesday that Knight does stand to earn income from the track, but it all depends on how he’s credited on the track. “The Invitation” was released through Cannon’s company Ncredible Entertainment, though they — and Cannon’s management — did not respond to Page Six’s request for clarification on the track’s credits.

“There are three questions that come up for me,” Dahl says. “First and foremost, does Nick Cannon have the right to use this recording? I’m gonna presume yes, so that seems like a non-issue.

“The second question is: Is this songwriting; should it be afforded songwriting credit? And that is sort of a question of degree in terms of what constitutes songwriting, and the law isn’t crystal-clear on this. But any contribution to lyrics, melody, or the actual composition of the music usually counts as songwriting.

“From my experience, and in industry practice, it really depends on what the two of them — or more likely, their lawyers — have agreed upon. If Suge said, ‘This is gonna be a key part of the song, I want ten percent,’ then they can agree on that. But if I were Nick Cannon, I’d say, ‘Well, no, I don’t wanna give you ten percent for this.’

“But, if this voicemail was the heart of the chorus, if this was sampled every time the chorus came around, well then, yeah, that would be songwriting, because it’s a big part of the hook.

“The third question I would ask is, ‘Is he registered as a performer on the master [recording]?’ Because he may be a performer rather than a songwriter, and that’s a lot more clear. That includes producers, and assuming they logged his contributions a certain way, he could see income from that, though it comes more from the master than the composition.”

Knight, 54, and Cannon have a close relationship: The elder man revealed in October that Cannon had been tapped to handle a book about Knight’s life, and described the “Masked Singer” host as “the most realest guy in the business today” to The Blast.

However, Dahl says that unless “The Invitation” racks up hundreds of millions of views, the payout to Knight will be minimal, given YouTube’s streaming royalty system. The song is not available on Spotify, and though its Genius lyrics page links to Apple Music, it seems likely most people are listening to the song on YouTube.

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