An FBI raid on a Detroit home turned up a hard drive full of unreleased Eminem recordings, and the man who allegedly sold them for Bitcoin is now heading toward a guilty plea.
Joseph Strange, a 48-year-old engineer who worked with Eminem from 2007 to 2021, is scheduled to appear in federal court on October 22 to plead guilty to one count of criminal copyright infringement.
Strange is credited on every Eminem album from 2009’s Relapse through 2020’s Music to Be Murdered By, which makes the betrayal sting a little harder for the rapper’s camp.
As part of the deal, prosecutors will drop the interstate transportation of stolen goods charge, which carried up to ten years in prison, leaving Strange facing a maximum of five years on the copyright count.
The case blew open in January 2025 when at least 25 unreleased Eminem tracks, recorded between 1998 and 2018, started surfacing online.
Investigators traced the material back to a hard drive found at Strange’s home during an FBI search, and Eminem’s current staff confirmed the songs came from a studio hard drive that had gone missing.
Strange didn’t just leak the music, he sold it. Investigators identified multiple buyers, including one Ontario resident who said he sent roughly $50,000 worth of Bitcoin to Strange in exchange for the unreleased material.
The plea deal covers Strange admitting to leaking around ten copies of one unreleased track between July 2024 and January 2025.
Eminem’s spokesman Dennis Dennehy did not hold back in his response. The levels of lying, deception and criminality undertaken by this man over the course of years are unfathomable, unforgettable and both legally and morally reprehensible,” Dennehy said, adding that Strange “was trusted to protect Eminem’s artistic output” and calling for the maximum punishment.
Strange’s attorney, Wade Fink, offered a very different read on the situation. The truth, though, is a far cry from what the allegations claim,” Fink said, while also noting that negotiations have been aimed at finding a resolution that is “fair to my client.” He added that Strange will ultimately “do what is best for himself and his family.
That tension between the two camps, one calling for the harshest possible sentence and the other hinting the full story hasn’t been told, is likely to define how the October 22 hearing plays out.
Strange was let go by Eminem’s team in 2021, and the timeline of when the leaks began relative to his dismissal is something prosecutors will almost certainly press on.
The sheer volume of material involved, spanning two decades of recordings, raises real questions about how long this was happening and how much unreleased music is still out there circulating in private hands.
With the plea date approaching and Strange’s attorney still leaving wiggle room in his public statements, this one is far from fully resolved.
