X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, filed a federal lawsuit on Friday against music publishers and their trade organization, accusing them of violating antitrust law by conspiring to force X to agree to licensing deals.
The case, filed in Federal District Court in Dallas, alleges that the music publishers “colluded” with their trade group, the National Music Publishers’ Association. According to the suit, the music groups “weaponized” the copyright takedown process to pressure X to accept blanket licensing agreements for songs “at inflated rates,” which the platform says left it no option to pursue smaller deals with individual publishers.
The publishers and the trade group, known as the N.M.P.A., “conspired to leverage their combined market power,” the suit says, “and coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from the industry as a whole, denying X the benefit of competition between music publishers.”
The suit seeks unspecified damages, as well as an injunction preventing the music groups from continuing to negotiate in the way the suit describes.
It was filed in the Northern District of Texas, where X has recently been steering cases. The company instituted a policy in 2024 that all user cases against it must be filed there — though X’s headquarters in Bastrop, Texas, are not part of that district. The Northern District is known for rulings favorable to conservative litigants.
David Israelite, the chief executive of the N.M.P.A., said in a statement: “X/Twitter is the only major social media company that does not license the songs on its platform. We allege that X has engaged in copyright infringement for years, and its meritless lawsuit is a bad faith effort to distract from publishers’ and songwriters’ legitimate right to enforce against X’s illegal use of their songs.”
Music publishers represent the copyrights for songwriting and composition, which are separate from the copyrights for recordings.
X’s lawsuit is the latest volley in a series of conflicts between the music industry and the social media platform, which was previously known as Twitter.
Well before Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and renamed it, music groups had been trying to get it to agree to licensing deals like the ones held by most social media platforms. Those deals give the platforms permission to host copyrighted works, and allow artists — and the record labels and music publishers they are signed to — to make money from posts using their material.
In 2013, Twitter briefly ran a music app, which was shut down after a few months. Starting in 2021, the company had been exploring licensing deals with the major music conglomerates, but those talks stalled once Musk took the platform over.
In 2023, after those negotiations broke down, music publishers and the N.M.P.A. sued Twitter in Federal District Court in Nashville, saying it had violated copyright law by allowing users to post music to the platform without permission.
That case also detailed what the publishers said was Twitter’s failure to police rampant infringement of copyrighted music on the service, saying that the company “routinely ignores known repeat infringers.”
In its own suit — filed in a different court — X retorted that it has instituted a “robust” policy to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the federal law that established online platforms’ obligations to deal with copyright infringement by their users.
The music companies’ suit against X is still pending, though its claims were narrowed in 2024 by the judge overseeing that case.
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
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