Founding KISS guitarist Ace Frehley died Thursday (Oct. 16) at age 74 after sustaining injuries suffered during a fall last month.

Frehley’s family issued a statement announcing the guitarist’s death, saying in part: “We are completely devastated and heartbroken. In his last moments, we were fortunate enough to have been able to surround him with loving, caring, peaceful words, thoughts, prayers and intentions as he left this earth. … Reflecting on all of his incredible life achievements, Ace’s memory will continue to live on forever!”

Frehley’s fellow rockers were also heartbroken when the news broke, coming out in droves on social media to share their love and condolences for the late musician and his family.

The guitarist’s onetime KISS bandmate and fellow co-founder Gene Simmons posted on X, writing, “Our hearts are broken. Ace has passed on. No one can touch Ace’s legacy. I know he loved the fans. He told me many times. Sadder still, Ace didn’t live long enough to be honored at the Kennedy Ctr Honors event in Dec. Ace was the eternal rock soldier. Long may his legacy live on!”

KISS will be honored at the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors, taping Dec. 7 and airing Dec. 23 on CBS. Frehley will be just the third person to receive the honor posthumously.

Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan posted a throwback photo of Frehley on Instagram, writing “Godspeed, Ace.”

Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello also posted a lengthy tribute, writing on Instagram that Frehley was, “My first guitar hero.”

“The legendary Space Ace Frehley inspired generations to love rock n roll and love rock n roll guitar playing,” Morello wrote. “His timeless riffs and solos, the billowing smoke coming from his Les Paul, the rockets shooting from his headstock, his cool spacey onstage wobble and his unforgettable crazy laugh will be missed but will never be forgotten. Thank you, Ace for a lifetime of great music and memories.

Grunge rockers Pearl Jam also shared a statement, noting that in their early days as a band they “spent untold hours talking about KISS and buying KISS stuff.”

“Ace was a hero of mine and also I would consider a friend,” guitarist Mike McCready added. “I studied his solos endlessly over the years.”

Poison’s Brett Michaels also shared a photo he took with the late musician, adding, “Ace, my brother, I surely cannot thank you enough for the years of great music, the many festivals we’ve done together and your lead guitar on Nothing But A Good Time. All my love and respect, from my family and myself – may you rest in peace!!!”

Frehley played on KISS’ first nine albums before he left the band in 1982. He later returned for the group’s 1998 reunion album, Psycho Circus, but left a few years later in 2002. The guitarist also released nine solo studio albums throughout his career.

Ace Frehley, the founding guitarist of KISS, died on Thursday (Oct. 16) at age 74, just seven weeks before the band is slated to receive a Kennedy Center Honor. That ceremony is set to tape on Dec. 7 and to air on CBS on Dec. 23.

Frehley will become only the third person to receive this honor posthumously, following two other group members who likewise died after the group’s awards were first announced: Glenn Frey of Eagles and Phil Lesh of Grateful Dead.

Ironically, for a cultural institution named after a slain president, the Kennedy Center has a policy that its honorees must be living.

Eagles were originally slated to receive the honor in December 2015, but Frey’s illness pushed the presentation back a year. Frey died in January 2016 at age 67 and the Kennedy Center included him when the group was honored that December.

Lesh died on Oct. 25, 2024 at age 84, just six weeks before the ceremony, where the group (including Lesh) was honored. The award also went to Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Bobby Weir, but lead guitarist and vocalist Jerry Garcia, who had died in 1995, was not honored.

In 2008, The Who became the first group to receive a Kennedy Center Honor, but only the two living members – Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey – were honored. The two members who had died – Keith Moon and John Entwistle – were not.

In 2012, Led Zeppelin became the second group to be honored, but again only the living members (John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant) were honored. There was no award for drummer John Bonham, who had died in 1980.

Even Maurice White, universally acknowledged as the mastermind behind Earth, Wind & Fire, was not included when that group was honored in 2019. The only members who were awarded were Philip Bailey, Verdine White and Ralph Johnson.

KISS is only the seventh group to receive a Kennedy Center Honor. And the award to KISS, following last year’s award to Grateful Dead, marks the first time two groups have been honored in back-to-back years. The other groups to be honored are The Who (2008), Led Zeppelin (2012), Eagles (2016), Earth, Wind & Fire (2019) and U2 (2022).

This year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony is set to air on Tuesday, Dec. 23, from 8-10:30 p.m. ET/PT. In addition to KISS, this year’s recipients are Grammy-winning country music icon George Strait, Tony-winning stage and screen star Michael Crawford, Grammy-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor and film icon Sylvester Stallone.

In announcing this year’s honorees on Aug. 13, President Trump said he would host the program. If he follows through on that, it will mark the first time an elected official, much less a president, has hosted the program.

The major record labels are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold their billion-dollar piracy lawsuit against Cox Communications, blasting the telecom giant for invoking “innocent grandmothers” in its appeal to the high court.

The massive copyright case — in which Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group (WMG) won a $1 billion verdict in 2019 — saw a lower court hold Cox itself liable over allegations of widespread illegal downloading by its users.

After the justices agreed to tackle the case, Cox argued in August that the lawsuit “jeopardizes internet access for millions of users.” But in their own response on Wednesday (Oct. 15), the labels mocked Cox’s “breathless” warnings.

“While Cox waxes poetic about the centrality of internet access to modern life, it neglects to mention that it had no qualms about terminating 619,711 subscribers for nonpayment over the same period,” the labels wrote. “And while Cox stokes fears of innocent grandmothers and hospitals being tossed off the internet for someone else’s infringement, Cox put on zero evidence that any subscriber here fit that bill.”

UMG, Sony and WMG teamed up to sue Cox in 2018, arguing the broadband provider should be held liable for alleged widespread wrongdoing committed by its users. The labels said Cox had ignored hundreds of thousands of infringement notices and had never permanently terminated a single subscriber accused of stealing music.

ISPs are typically shielded from such claims by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), but a judge ruled that Cox had forfeited that protection by failing to terminate people who were repeatedly accused of piracy. With Cox stripped of immunity, jurors held the company liable in December 2019 for infringing 10,017 separate songs and awarded the labels more than $99,000 per song — adding up to a whopping $1 billion.

Last year, a federal appeals court ordered the award recalculated, ruling that aspects of the verdict were improper. But the appeals court also upheld other parts, and Cox is still facing the potential of a very large penalty when it is reissued.

In June, the Supreme Court granted Cox’s petition to review that ruling. That move came after the U.S. Department of Justice told the justices to do so, warning that the ruling against Cox could “cause numerous non-infringing users to lose their internet access.”

In its opening brief last month, Cox adopted a similar argument, warning that a ruling for the music companies might force ISPs to take aggressive measures against their subscribers out of fear of huge liability.

“If allowed to stand, the [lower court]’s one-two punch will yield mass evictions from the internet,” the company wrote. “ISPs confronting steep penalties will have no choice but to terminate the connections of homes, barracks, hospitals and hotels, upon bare accusation.”

But in Wednesday’s response, the labels said those arguments “ignore the record and distort the law.” Far from random grandmas, the labels say Cox knew that the individual subscribers at issue in the case were breaking the law and chose not to terminate them because it “wanted to keep the money flowing in.”

“Cox made a deliberate and egregious decision to elevate its own profits over compliance with the law, supplying the means for massive copyright infringement to specific users that it knew were habitual offenders,” the labels write.

The case will be argued before the justices at some point in the next few months, with a ruling expected early next year.

A collection of remixes of Daft Punk‘s third album Human After All are set to be released on vinyl for the first time ever.

The project will be released on Nov. 28 as a double album, with pre-sales open now.

The project marks the 20-year anniversary of Human After All, which hit No. 98 on the Billboard 200 in April of 2005. The year after its release, a collection of remixes by Daft Punk associates and peers including Justice, Soulwax and SebastiAn were released on CD exclusively in Japan.

In 2014, another batch of Human After All remixes by artists including Basement Jaxx and The Juan Maclean also came out, with the entire collection added to streaming services that same year. With some tracks being remixed more than once, the collection then added to DSPs and now being released on vinyl now features 15 tracks.

Made in just six months, Human After All followed 2001’s Discovery, with the French duo then not releasing another studio album until 2013’s Random Access Memories.

Human After All Remixes Tracklist:

A1 Robot Rock (Soulwax Remix)
A2 Human After All (SebastiAn Remix)
A3 Technologic (Peaches No Logic Remix)
A4 The Brainwasher (Erol Alkan’s Horrorhouse Dub)
B1 The Prime Time Of Your Life (Para One Remix)
B2 Human After All (“Guy-Man After All” Justice Remix)
B3 Technologic (Digitalism Remix)
B4 Human After All (Emperor Machine Version)
C1 Technologic (Vitalic Remix)
C2 Robot Rock (Daft Punk Maximum Overdrive Mix)
C3 Technologic (Liquid Twins Remix)
C4 Technologic (Basement Jaxx Kontrol Mixx)
D1 Human After All (The Juan Maclean Remix)
D2 Human After All (Alter Ego Remix)
D3 Technologic (Knight Club Remix)

Ty Dolla $ign and Ye (formerly Kanye West) teamed up for a pair of Vultures joint projects in 2024, but it appears their relationship has become icy in 2025.

Ahead of his Tycoon album’s arrival, Ty spoke to Complex‘s Jordan Rose on Thursday (Oct. 16), but dodged a question about his current status with West.

“Six, seven,” Ty said, quoting the trending emote that became popularized from Skrilla’s “Doot Doot (6, 7)” track. “I don’t really want to talk about it, next one.”

Dolla $ign then explained how he lent tracks that were slated to land on his solo album to the Vultures project, and it wasn’t vice versa.

“A lot of those records were from my album. You understand? [I gave them] to the cause,” he explained. Rose asked him if it was worth it, to which Ty replied, “Was it not?”

Vultures topped the Billboard 200 in February 2024, and album standout “Carnival,” featuring Rich the Kid and Playboi Carti, reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Their relationship at the moment is unclear, but footage emerged of West pulling up to Ty’s Tycoon album listening party in Los Angeles earlier in October.

Tycoon serves as Ty’s fourth studio album and the project hits streaming services at midnight on Friday (Oct. 17). The album is slated to feature Travis Scott, Leon Thomas and Young Thug.

Ty Dolla $ign had teased tracks like “Wheels Fall Off” featuring Ye and Vultures 3, but it doesn’t appear that the latter will ultimately materialize.

Back in February, Ty released a statement to his Instagram Story about condemning hate speech, which many tied to West’s antisemitic rhetoric. “I do not condone ANY form of hate speech toward ANYBODY,” he wrote.