When a heavily anticipated rap album is finally released and meets or exceeds expectations the word “classic” is always thrown around excessively as if the second coming of Illmatic has just emerged from a murky sea of autotune and 808s. Simply put, Kendrick Lamar’s major label debut Good Kid, M.A.A.D City deserves the “classic” label moreso than any hip-hop album released in the past few years.

In this week's column: Universal and the Parker & Mr. French group team up, Ed Sheeran tops the album chart after nearly a year meandering in it, an opportunity to write music for next year's Sydney Festival, and news from three industry awards nights that occurred last week!

In this ongoing series we introduce you to songs that have (legally) borrowed, alluded to, been inspired by or stolen from (knowingly or unknowingly) the riff of another song. And we'll have plenty more for you in the weeks ahead... this week we look at a more obvious riff off, where the riff from the original was appropriated, by permission, for a future track - and within a very short period too I might add.

Detroit emcee Obie Trice's career was kick-started by a clever marketing ploy – Eminem included the now-infamous line “Obie Trice, real name no gimmicks” at the start of his worldwide hit "Without Me". Since then, Trice had almost everybody that was already on the Eminem bandwagon anticipating his every move. With that, Trice went on to release his debut LP Cheers to both critical and commercial success, an album which remains one of Shady Record’s best releases.

"Holy shit" seems to be among the most commonly used words on the internet this morning with the announcement of the Coachella 2012 lineup.

Yesterday saw the premiere of the new video "Kush" - the first single from Detox (out in 2011) featuring Snoop Dogg and Akon. Oh and did we mention the song is helmed by none other than Dr. Dre?

That's right bitches. Dr. Dre is back.