{"id":2228861,"date":"2026-01-09T21:05:21","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T21:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2228861"},"modified":"2026-01-09T21:05:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T21:05:21","slug":"elon-musks-x-formerly-twitter-sues-music-publishers-nmpa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/elon-musks-x-formerly-twitter-sues-music-publishers-nmpa\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk&#8217;s X (Formerly Twitter) Sues Music Publishers, NMPA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<!-- do not apply CSS styles to this element! --><\/p>\n<div class=\"pmc-paywall\">\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\tElon Musk\u2019s X (formerly <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/twitter\/\" id=\"auto-tag_twitter\" data-tag=\"twitter\">Twitter<\/a>) has filed an antitrust lawsuit against some 18 music publishers and their trade organization, the National Music Publishers Association, in the latest move in a <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2025\/digital\/news\/music-publishers-and-x-negotiations-copyright-lawsuit-1236435676\/\">drawn-out battle over licensing<\/a>. The platform alleges that the companies and NMPA colluded in order to coerce X into purchasing industrywide licenses, without which the platform cannot legally host many thousands of songs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\tThe lawsuit, filed Friday, alleges that the companies and NMPA attempted to \u201cleverage monopoly power\u201d to compel X into acquiring licenses from all music publishers at unfairly high rates, and \u201cconspired to leverage their combined market power,\u201d the suit says, \u201cand coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from the industry as a whole, denying X the benefit of competition between music publishers.\u201d X claims that it is being prevented from negotiating deals with individual publishers; the lawsuit seeks a court order granting it that right, as well as unspecified damages.<\/p>\n<p><iframe id=\"pmc-polymarket\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\" title=\"pmc-polymarket\" src=\"https:\/\/embed.polymarket.com\/market.html?market=will-paul-thomas-anderson-one-battle-after-another-win-best-director-at-the-83rd-golden-globes&amp;features=volume&amp;theme=light&amp;width=Infinity&amp;features=volume&amp;theme=light&amp;height=170pxl\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" style=\"width: 600px; height: 170px;margin-top: 15px !important; border: 0px;&#10;&#9;padding: 0px;\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\tThe three largest music publishers \u2014 Sony, Universal and Warner \u2014 were among the companies named in the suit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\tThe move is the latest in a long battle between X and the publishers over licenses, which includes a 2023 lawsuit against X by NMPA. The two sides nearly came to terms last November but did not close the deal, although as recently as November 25 they claimed to \u201chave made very substantial progress toward settlement and worked on a written settlement agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\t\u201cX\/Twitter is the only major social media company that does not license the songs on its platform,\u201d says NMPA president-CEO David Israelite. \u201cWe allege that X has engaged in copyright infringement for years, and its meritless lawsuit is a bad faith effort to distract from publishers\u2019 and songwriters\u2019 legitimate right to enforce against X\u2019s illegal use of their songs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\tThe dispute is a familiar one, as many emerging platforms, from TikTok to Twitch to Triller, attempted to sidestep or reduce their licensing fees, only to be met with aggressive lawsuits from NMPA and other publishers that have usually resulted in deals being struck.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<p><em> \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em> \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source variety.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Elon Musk\u2019s X (formerly Twitter) has filed an antitrust lawsuit against some 18 music publishers and their trade organization, the National Music Publishers Association, in the latest move in a drawn-out battle over licensing. The platform alleges that the companies and NMPA colluded in order to coerce X into purchasing industrywide licenses, without which the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2228862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[431173,309513],"class_list":["post-2228861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-national-music-publishers-assocation","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Elon-Musks-X-Formerly-Twitter-Sues-Music-Publishers-NMPA.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2228861"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2228863,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228861\/revisions\/2228863"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2228862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2228861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2228861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2228861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}