reusing the name audacity for a new project is super sketchy, there are trademarks on it right now.
if you want to fork audacity, you need to pick a new name.

also, the decision so far was not to add telemetry.

and from what we have been told, everyone that has contributed to audacity (the rights present in the current code, old/deleted code not relevant) has signed a CLA. thus making the CLA + GPL 100% valid for Audacity.
Wherever you agree with it or not is a different matter, but from what we have been told, they did their homework and everything is legal and fair.

thus making the CLA... valid for Audacity.

This is questionable considering current code is probably a derivative work of old code which was licensed as GPLv2 or later.

I do agree that reusing the name "Audacity" in a fork is in bad taste and probably a violation of the trademark.

thus making the CLA... valid for Audacity.

This is questionable considering current code is probably a derivative work of old code which was licensed as GPLv2 or later.

Yes, but verifying this ourselves seems almost impossible. We have to trust they did things correctly, otherwise someone from the Audacity dev team would have spoken out by now.
If they were coerced to it somehow, we cannot know. It is better to give the benefit of the doubt here.

Muse Group has imposed a CLA on MuseScore. That's another topic though. Let's discuss that in #844.

MuseScore CLA was put in place by the original founders of MuseScore and from the very beginning of the project.

Thank you for clarifying but also 😬

Muse Group is a private entity.

As is standard practice for private companies, there is no obligation to share any financial or shareholder information.

Regarding the issue of the various dates, I'm not sure if you have ever established a company or made a large purchase like, say, a house. It is not unusual for such a transaction to take several months to complete the process.

So, the date of incorporation does not mean the date of entering into commerce and the date of closing of a transaction often implies that the transaction was started months before.

There are many legitimate reasons to wait to announce a transaction, that might not be directly related to the transaction itself.

All of this is very, very standard practice and no one is trying to be deceitful. This is just simply how all of this sort of thing works in actual practice.

As is standard practice for private companies, there is no obligation to share any financial or shareholder information.

Yes, and this is why privately-developed software is less trustworthy. If you intend to remain as trusted as you were before this takeover, you need to adhere to the standards of openness and trust that the free software community adheres to. Should be noted as well that many trustworthy companies do in fact disclose who the primary shareholders are.

Regarding the issue of the various dates, I'm not sure if you have ever established a company or made a large purchase like, say, a house. It is not unusual for such a transaction to take several months to complete the process.

It is a matter of public record that the Audacity trademark was transferred to MuseCY SM Ltd. in December, and, in fact, MuseCY immediately began disputes against other companies with similar trademarks, all before any publication of this. The transaction was entirely complete months before announcement. I'm not sure why you're making such a false analogy.

Yes, and this is why privately-developed software is less trustworthy.

Audacity is, was, and always will be GPL.

The full source code is available for anyone to examine, customize, fork, etc.

What about the software could possibly bee deemed not trustworthy?

It is a matter of public record that the Audacity trademark was transferred to MuseCY SM Ltd. in December, and, in fact, MuseCY immediately began disputes against other companies with similar trademarks, all before any publication of this. The transaction was entirely complete months before announcement. I'm not sure why you're making such a false analogy.

There is absolutely nothing unusual about this. It is very much standard practice.

It doesn't mean that we had any nefarious reason to not announce immediately upon close. Keep in mind there were other transactions and restructuring we were closing at the same time.

You seem to be trying to find an issue where there is none.

Audacity is, was, and always will be GPL. The full source code is available for anyone to examine, customize, fork, etc. What about the software could possibly bee deemed not trustworthy?

If the software can be audited, that is entirely different from whether it, in point of fact, has been audited by persons not affiliated or employed by Muse Group.

For the last 4 months, has all code been both pushed and reviewed only by persons employed by muse group, or has there been significant oversight by someone who you can tell me is not employed or in a financial relationship to Muse Group?

What about the software could possibly bee deemed not trustworthy?

@workedintheory as maintainers, you can lead the direction in which the software is developed. that might not be the direction the community wants. everyone has interests. to build trust, it's important to talk openly about your interests. disclosing the shareholders of an organization is part of that

you invest money in the project. how is it planned to make profit with it? i'm not sure if that was already explained elsewhere

If I would have contributed there I would not sign this but asking them to remove my contribution... They're not on ones right mind... (I really need to clarify if I possibly can except them from using/linking against/derive from my GPLed code (with a lawyer, obviously).)

Again, the CLA for MuseScore was put in place by the original founders from the very beginning of the project. No contributions to MuseScore have ever been accepted without signing the CLA.

Again, the CLA for MuseScore was put in place by the ...

You have not realized, that this is about Audacity, have you?

We are talking about the same "group" that couldn't completely understand (rolls eyes) that over 1000+ posts in a github issue meant that the community and the users didn't want the #835 telemetry this same group was trying to force on the project. They don't care about Audacity.

understand that the recent secretiveness around the overtake

The secretiveness seems to have started long before Muse Group had anything to do with Audacity... #840 (comment)

understand that the recent secretiveness around the overtake

The secretiveness seems to have started long before Muse Group had anything to do with Audacity... #840 (comment)

that is quite the stretch. they could just be talking about private developer discussions, such as in IRC or discord or even as a meeting. those are often not logged in written form.

@orenwatson your insinuation is an insult to me and my efforts and the efforts of all the rest of the pre-transition team.

By all means hunt through the commit logs of version 3.0.2 and before. You will find nothing.

I'm sorry that you felt insulted. But my comments are based on facts, viz:

• Audacity trademark has been bought by Muse Group, a Cypriot shell company with unknown owners.
• Furthermore, an unknown number, possibly all, of the Audacity dev team has been hired by this company and, is willing to keep its secrets.
• Such shell companies are generally considered suspicious of being money laundering or other criminality.
• The dealings were conducted 4-5 months ago or more, and in that time, no public announcement was made and thus, the audacity devs were operating without much public oversight.
• Hence, if Muse Group was indeed a malefactor, these 4-5 months of secrecy would be the perfect time to do some sort of malicious act.

I will add that it would be easier to assuage these sort of concerns if more information about these dealings was made public, in particular:

• Which members of the Audacity team were hired by Muse Group, and how long have they been working for Muse Group?
• Who are the actual owners of MuseCY Holdings Ltd, MuseCY SM Ltd. MuseScore BVBA, and what is the relationship between these companies?
• Has any CLA been imposed on the Audacity Team?

I'm not holding my breath for any answers considering they haven't provided any already. Very sketchy and leads me to assume the worst.

Looking at GitHub's analytics and contributors graph (I don't know why the latter doesn't go back farther than 2015?), most of the code recently has been written by @Paul-Licameli, @JamesCrook, @lllucius, @SteveDaulton, and @Gootector. Investigating #840 I found that @lllucius has been contributing code since at least 2008 (maybe longer), although they recently posted they will stop contributing to Audacity soon.

Originally we used CVS on sourceforge, then we switched to SVN on Google Code (a better service at that time). When Google Code shut down in 2015, we migrated to GitHub. You can get the contributor history prior to 2015 from https://github.com/audacity/audacity-from-svn-5GB.

Gootector is contributing translations, not C++ code.
llucius has been contributing code from way back. You can also see from his graph that he took a break from work on Audacity from 2016 to 2019.

In the GitHub interface people can choose to be visible or not visible in teams. You shouldn't read anything sinister into someone choosing not to appear visibly in a GitHub team. That is just a choice they have made, like enabling 2FA or not enabling it.

That explains the sudden spike of positive feedback, but it does not explain why the bad reviews were posted in the first place.

For those who didn't get @orenwatson's reply: that means @workedintheory lied, as had the reviews been legitimately written through a Trustpilot widget, they would not have been counted as "Organic". "Organic" is what you get when users write reviews out of their own accord... or what you get when you buy fake reviews. Reviews posted using the widget as @workedintheory claimed (the "Embedded Review Form") would have been accounted for as "Automated invitations". Reviews posted via some other kind of legitimate invitation from MuseScore, like a legitimate invitation link, would count as "Manual invitations". More information on the Trustpilot labels here. Also see this.

If MuseScore directed users to write a review without using the legitimate widget or invitation/link systems, then those are effectively fake/illegitimate reviews, as they were accounted as "organic" while not being so.

If MuseScore directed users to write a review without using the legitimate widget or invitation/link systems, then those are effectively fake/illegitimate reviews, as they were accounted as "organic" while not being so.

It could also mean that MuseScore did not use the widget (nor the API-Generator) thus making the statement

To test this, we simply prompting users of the site to provide feedback via a widget for the service.

a lie/mistake. This would not necessarily result in me mistrusting Muse in case it can be proven that all of those ratings were really redirects from Musescore. One could prove this by

1. Providing (view-only) access to the development repository of the musescore website and showing the commit in which the code referring the user to trustpilot was made
2. Asking the trustpilot team to look at the IP-Range those ratings came from and whether they had "musescore.com" as a referrer

Preferably both.

2. Asking the trustpilot team to look at the IP-Range those ratings came from and whether they had "musescore.com" as a referrer

IMO - I don't think it has to be that specific. Looking at the data it is quite suspicious since there is such a large statistical anomaly. I would think TrustPilot would find it worthwhile to investigate as it seems to go against their own guidelines: between the Asking For Reviews and No Fake Reviews! topics. (Admittedly, it's a little bit sketchy, as Muse Group may have done this in a way that somewhat circumvents TrustPilot's policies -- but I think it's a question of ethics worthy of TrustPilot's concern.)

Also they seem to violate / ignore licenses until probably threatened by lawyers:
Xmader/musescore-downloader#29

There is no violation here though, this is false. All contributors signed a CLA

A MuseScore Fork I found in the Thread seems to slowly get traction:

LibreScore
https://github.com/LibreScore/LibreScore
https://demo.librescore.org/#/

LibreScore is not a fork of MuseScore but a completely separate web project for serverless score sharing.

We have never had any issue with this at all, as it does not violate any of our IP.

There are two other projects of the same user that do violate our IP, which we have taken issue with. This is code for circumvention of systems controlling access to copyrighted works, as well as a dataset of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works downloaded from Musescore.com using this circumvention code.

Both of these projects have nothing to do with FOSS, but are about unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.

Both of these projects have nothing to do with FOSS, but are about unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.

I would like to remind you that some of the copyrighted original compositions on musescore.com are licensed under non-commercial terms (and hosting them there was legitimate prior to the paywall), which means you and MuseScore are violating their copyright by now distributing them for a fee in violation of the licensing terms, while using that user's tool to download them without paying your fee, and hosting those works elsewhere for free, is, on the contrary, not violating those license terms.

I have to keep repeating this, as you keep avoiding this subject and pretending the few companies you pay royalties to out of your subscription fee own all of the world's non-public-domain compositions, which is patently absurd.

Why does musescore.com still not have composition licensing options including CC and "other, distribution allowed" that allow free downloads, in addition to PD? Why were all existing compositions marked as "non-PD" and their royalties delivered to some random companies of your choosing, ignoring whether the actual copyright holder is represented by them or not?

And who at Muse Group thought the right response to this issue, whatever it may be, was to issue a threat of physically locating that user with the cooperation of an authoritarian government?

that allow free downloads

Don't just allow free downloads, but allow original works to be monetized by their authors. That requires creating a payment system separate from "pay a subscription to random companies that may or may not have anything to do with the content".

And who at Muse Group thought the right response to this issue, whatever it may be, was to issue a threat of physically locating that user with the cooperation of an authoritarian government?

@workedintheory already explained that part:

The situation here is pretty simple - a developer made comments that were obviously not official statements of the company, that they did not have authority to make, and were made without the consent or even awareness of the company.

Why, then, do you continue to host such scores, charge for their downloads, and send the proceeds to unrelated third parties?

We do not charge for downloads of original works uploaded by the composer.

You have an entire misc unsigned bands "artist". According to your logic, all of those compositions are banned, as they are neither public domain (which would allow them to be downloaded for free) nor signed to rights agencies that you have a deal with (which would allow you to legitimately paywall them).

That is a user generated categorization (see the edit and merge functions at top right of page).

How about everything by ZUN? I guarantee you he didn't upload any of that stuff himself, nor is he signed with any of the agencies you have a deal with. You either have a deal with him/Twilight Frontier directly, or you don't. I'm guessing you don't.

MuseScore has relationships with more than 2,000 publishers. If any rights holder wishes for any of their works to be taken down from MuseScore.com they may file a DMCA request for it to be taken down.

So, again, can you answer why you continue to paywall and collect royalties on scores not managed by your partners? Many of those scores might be perfectly legitimate to host as free downloads (I'm sure many minor/indie bands would be happy to give such consent) - everything by ZUN is one example, as his music is licensed under something with is very broadly similar to CC-BY-NC - but you are not offering any option to do so.

If any rights holder believes that their work is either available on Musescore.com without their consent or that the incorrect license is attributed to the score, they may file a DMCA request or contact the Copyright Agent also listed on the DMCA link to clarify any licensing.

They are not public domain. They are not managed by your partners. For the upteenth time: why do you not offer an option to mark such compositions as OK for free download?

I do agree we should improve our licensing options and we are actively working on this, but the challenge is with the way CC licensing works in the context of the broader music publishing industry and standard practices that we must also follow.

If a rights holder of a work wishes to make a work available as public domain, we must verify directly with the rights holder of that work their intent to make this public domain. Any written copyright statement on the work is not sufficient if work is submitted by a third party.

Accordingly, any work that may be considered to be in the public domain but does not meet the statutory requirements for automatic designation as public domain (i.e. - time since death of composer) must be assumed to be a copyrighted work unless verified with the creator/rights holder of the work.

You are actively committing fraud and copyright violation by continuing to charge for content which you are not authorized to collect royalties on.

MuseScore is DMCA compliant.

If any rights holder believes that their work is either available on Musescore.com without their consent or that the incorrect license is attributed to the score, they may file a DMCA request or contact the Copyright Agent also listed on the DMCA link to clarify any licensing.

We do not charge for downloads of original works uploaded by the composer.

But you charge for downloads of works of artists who are not represented by your partners.

That is a user generated categorization (see the edit and merge functions at top right of page).

Right, and? Please answer the question: are you authorized to collect royalties on the compositions (none of which are PD as far as I can tell) in that category?

MuseScore has relationships with more than 2,000 publishers. If any rights holder wishes for any of their works to be taken down from MuseScore.com they may file a DMCA request for it to be taken down.

ZUN does not have a relationship with any general music publisher or rights association, only individual companies using his compositions in their derivative works and a very specific music distributor which is not in the business of scores or of partnering with MuseScore; I am completely confident that you do not have a partnership that covers his works.

As I'm sure you're aware, the DMCA incorporates the concept of "red flag", where an entity that is knowingly infringing and the infringement would be apparent to a reasonable person, is not afforded the protections of safe harbor laws.

Given that you are collecting payment for all of those scores, and have a flag on your system that marks them as non-PD, and have relationships with publishers which obviously entitles you to know what compositions you do have the right to distribute for a fee and collect royalties on... I'm not sure the DMCA shield is as impenetrable for your case as you think it is.

Further, the DMCA explicitly excludes from safe harbor those entities which derive a direct financial benefit from the infringing activity. You fall squarely in that category. You are not entitled to safe harbor protection for scores you paywall.

It's one thing to host mis-labeled user generated content (e.g. someone uploads a score and tags the composition as PD when it isn't). It's quite another to be charging a subscription fee for access to material, which you have tagged as such, that you do not actually hold a license to.

If any rights holder believes that their work is either available on Musescore.com without their consent or that the incorrect license is attributed to the score, they may file a DMCA request or contact the Copyright Agent also listed on the DMCA link to clarify any licensing.

See above.

They are not public domain. They are not managed by your partners. For the upteenth time: why do you not offer an option to mark such compositions as OK for free download?

I do agree we should improve our licensing options and we are actively working on this, but the challenge is with the way CC licensing works in the context of the broader music publishing industry and standard practices that we must also follow.

What is the challenge? It is as simple as allowing compositions to be tagged CC or otherwise "not subject to the subscription fee". People who want to illegitimately upload scores of copyrighted compositions under your partners' control and bypass the paywall can already do so by marking them as original or PD. There is absolutely zero risk to your partners in adding more options that could be used to accomplish the same thing. It would just fix the problem you have for those songs which you don't have partnerships for, and put you in a better position liability-wise, as you would be giving the users the tools they need to accurately tag compositions and thus ensure compliance.

Right now, your UX is deliberately designed to mislead users into believing it is legitimate and correct to upload scores based on arbitrary copyrighted compositions, then assuming you have a license to those compositions through your partners.

If a rights holder of a work wishes to make a work available as public domain, we must verify directly with the rights holder of that work their intent to make this public domain. Any written copyright statement on the work is not sufficient if work is submitted by a third party.

It's not "public domain". Are you sure you understand how copyright law works? It is perfectly fine for copyright holders to give permission for users to upload derivative works, and that is how licenses work, without making anything public domain. You absolutely do not need to "verify" anything directly with the rights holder; this is what DMCA safe harbor law is for. You are not going to be under any extra liability for allowing users to tag compositions under the correct license.

And again - the problem isn't that you're banning and removing those things. The problem is you leave them up on your site and then charge royalties for them. You keep distracting away from that point, as if this were merely an issue of infringing user-generated content. It is not. You are actively claiming every non-PD/non-original composition categorized on your website is managed by your partners by default. That is insane. That is much more likely to get you in legal hot water than people mis-tagging stuff on upload on purpose.

Accordingly, any work that may be considered to be in the public domain but does not meet the statutory requirements for automatic designation as public domain (i.e. - time since death of composer) must be assumed to be a copyrighted work unless verified with the creator/rights holder of the work.

And that is perfectly fine. But the problem is not that you're assuming it's copyrighted. The problem is that you're assuming it's copyrighted and that you're entitled to distribute it, collect royalties, and send them off to a random third party.

MuseScore is DMCA compliant.

(c) INFORMATION RESIDING ON SYSTEMS OR NETWORKS AT DIRECTION OF USERS.-

'(1) IN GENERAL.-A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider-

• (A)(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;

  • (ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or

  • (iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;

• (B) does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity; and

• (C) upon notification of claimed infringement as de-scribed in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.

Sorry, you fail clause B. You are not entitled to safe harbor provisions, and are therefore committing copyright infringement.

MuseScore was DMCA compliant until you started charging for scores by default.

It is certainly on our roadmap to create potential revenue generating opportunities for the creator. I will say that original works account for only a very, very small percentage of views and downloads.

That could change when you create a way for independent musicians to monetize their work. I'm sure there are many bands using MuseScore to communicate among themselves (I've been in two myself) who would happily upload to MuseScore.com and monetize the scores they've already made.

But you charge for downloads of works of artists who are not represented by your partners.

This is the crux of the issue. It your responsibility to ensure that the content behind the paywall is only that which you have arrangements with the copyright holder. It is not okay to assume that every copyrighted work uploaded that is not an original work has the copyright held by companies you already have arrangements with. It is up to you to check the uploaded scores against a list of works whose copyright are held by whoever you have arrangements with. If the score does not match that list, you cannot assume you have permission to monetize it.

If I was an independent musician or worked for an independent label who had scores on MuseScore.com that were behind a paywall and the money was going to unrelated companies, I'd be awfully pissed off. I'd likely want to send you a DMCA takedown notice and/or sue you rather than set up a licensing deal. On the other hand, if those scores uploaded by fans were not being monetized by MuseScore.com, I probably wouldn't mind and/or I'd be more inclined to set up an arrangement to monetize them with the money going to the actual copyright holder.

Users can only upload original works that other users may access and download for free (though they may disable downloads). As such, there is nothing to pay them, we are not generating revenue from this content.

But that is not true. You are generating revenue since they are only available to download if the user subscribes to your service. Attached are screenshots of me looking at and trying to download a score that is licensed under a CC BY license... This proves that you are using Creative Commons licensed works to monetize your website.

It is certainly on our roadmap to create potential revenue generating opportunities for the creator. I will say that original works account for only a very, very small percentage of views and downloads.

It's shouldn't just be on your road map. It should have been part of the plans to monetize the website.

Also, what version of the Creative Commons are people selecting? If the work was originally licensed under CC 3.0 (and earlier) there are some very different interpretations of the license clauses that need to be understood as it wasn't consistent across all regions. CC 4.0 cleared up these discrepancies.

I will have to investigate this more clearly. But, again, though users may designate variants of CC licenses, we are not able to enforce these. It is either CC-0 and freely downloadable or CC variant and up to the user to determine if they wish to restrict downloads or actually enforce the CC variant (ex: Attribution, etc.).

Not difficult to research... It was part of the CC 4.0 License Announcement right under the A more global license subject. More detailed information is available in the Creative Commons Wiki article about License Versions.

Is the rhetorical point that you're trying to make that a huge portion of the community shares this opinion?

Which community, exactly?

The user community? The contributor community?

So, to clarify, you're now asking me to clarify my request for you to clarify?

Yeah, that totally doesn't strike me as being remotely like anything a troll would say.</sarcasm>

So, to clarify, you're now asking me to clarify my request for you to clarify?

There is an important distinction here.

At your request, I'll cut any PR speak bullshit and just speak to you person to person in this post.

You are making arbitrary demands on how the project should be operate and be managed, yet you are not a contributor to the project.

We certainly listen very carefully to recommendations or suggestions and absolutely wish to learn as much as we can from best practices of other FOSS projects, but you cannot place operational demands on a contributor community that you are not a contributor to.

I can only assume then that you are a member of the user community (why else would you be here?), and listening to feedback from users is absolutely critical to the success of any software project.

Again, we are absolutely committed to listening to and supporting the needs of the contributor community and the user community. But, there is no other possible community, tangible or intangible, that we have any form of obligation to.

I'll keep repeating this, Audacity was, is, and always will be GPL. As such, source code was, is, and always will be freely available and you may do what you see fit with it so long as it conforms to GPL.

There are several threads repeating some of the exact same points that have been addressed again and again. This particular discussion is not resulting in any new information. I'm happy to discuss any other relevant topic or issue, but will not further discuss any points that have been repeatedly addressed.

@workedintheory

At your request, I'll cut any PR speak bullshit and just speak to you person to person in this post.

You are making arbitrary demands on how the project should be operate and be managed, yet you are not a contributor to the project.

That's irrelevant.

We certainly listen very carefully to recommendations or suggestions and absolutely wish to learn as much as we can from best practices of other FOSS projects, but you cannot place operational demands on a contributor community that you are not a contributor to.

I agree that @AntiSol's position is untenable, however your position is not any better.

I can only assume then that you are a member of the user community (why else would you be here?), and listening to feedback from users is absolutely critical to the success of any software project.

There is a largely false assertion that you are trying to make here: there are multiple communities, and all of them are mutually exclusive. That is not the way Open Source projects work. There is a singular community around a project. Individuals chose their roles within that community. Some of them are users, some are advocates, some are developers, some are contributors and some fill ancillary roles. None of these roles are mutually exclusive. A person can be a user one day, and start contributing code the next. Someone who has been an advocate for the software could take on an ancillary role (say forum moderator or website maintainer).

In another discussion I offered to help with non-coding specific work, and was requested to undertake a task. I started on it, but have set it aside now as what I am seeing in this discussion is not leaving me with the impression that a contribution as a non-developer would be appreciated as being apart of the community.

There are several threads repeating some of the exact same points that have been addressed again and again. This particular discussion is not resulting in any new information. I'm happy to discuss any other relevant topic or issue, but will not further discuss any points that have been repeatedly addressed.

However, there are also many points in this discussion and in discussion #889 that are not being addressed, many days after being posted.

Instead of talking down to the community members, no matter what role they currently hold, it would be much better to undertake addressing these issues with the respect and transparency that a 20+ year old community deserves. Instead you are being baited into snarky, disrespectful debates when the community as a whole deserves better.

My biggest two remaining questions are:

1. Was the original maintainer team gagged with tight NDA's to make this Coup d'état easier?
   (because it was a coup - the community wasn't involved a single bit in that important decision beforehand)

2. How are Muse's plans or far visions to monetize Audacity?

You may also want to hear some stories about Muse's attitude too.

This has been addressed.

#889 (reply in thread)

Nope. This isn't uncommon at all. Many companies have other companies within them - that's the nature of multi-national corporations. Examples from the auto industry here in the US: Saturn was an automobile company, but unknown to many it was a subsidiary owned by General Motors. In England the Vauxhall was actually a subsidiary owned by GM.

That's one way in which companies organize themselves. Another way, is to file what is known as a DBA (in the US, I don't know what it is in other countries), aka Doing Business As. This allows a company to operate under a different name from their official name.

I almost did this a few years ago... I was going to start my own LLC, and gather my website, podcast and netlabel under the LLC. To do this, the LLC would have filed DBA's for each of these items.

In this case, I believe MuseCY has done something along the DBA route as they have several "brands" (or projects) to pull together, including Ultimate Guitar, Audacity, Muse and one more I can't remember off the top of my head.

Nah, the different names don't make it shady, what makes it shady is that it is Cypriot shell company with no actual premises, known ownership, etc; (there is no connection from "Muse Group" to any actual person in Cyprus, for example) which is the type of company used in money laundering a lot.

https://cyprus-mail.com/2020/02/12/eu-report-highlights-cyprus-vulnerability-to-money-laundering/

For the record I am not accusing MuseCY Holdings LTD of money laundering, but I am accusing them of being secretive about their ownership and activities. It is likely that Eugeny Naidenov is the primary owner of MuseCY Holdings LTD, but this is not made clear.

I don't know why they specifically incorporated as "MUSECY HOLDINGS", but I don't think there's anything shady about that. It's common for companies to present themselves to (potential) customers and the public with a shortened version of the full name of the legal entity.