A cease and desist letter has been issued to a Guns N’ Roses fan who has been accused of leaking almost 100 of the band’s unreleased tracks online.
Universal Music Group says that Rick Dunsford is responsible for uploading 97 tracks that were recorded across 2000 and 2001 and had previously never seen the light of day.
Dunsford is thought to have obtained the tracks when Guns N’ Roses’ former A&R man Tom Zutaut sold him the contents of his storage unit at auction, TMZ reports.
“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,” a manager for Guns N’ Roses said.
The band’s management are believed to have originally demanded that Dunsford return the recordings and reimburse the $15,000 he and a group of associates spent on the tracks.
But UMG say that Dunsford decided to leak the material a month later, an accusation which he denies.
In October 2019, Dunsford also claimed that he has been banned from all of the band’s concerts in wake of the leak.
“About two-and-a-half months ago, I drove to Virginia, and there was a storage locker that belonged to Tom Zutaut,” he told WXLP. “He didn’t pay his bills or something and it was auctioned off.
“There was an 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.”
Dunsford is said to be a huge fan of the band – he has multiple tattoos of the band’s signatures, and named his son Axl.
Guns N Roses will return to Europe in Summer 2020 – including two shows at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.