The Pop Corporation

Elon Musk’s Twitter (no-one is calling it X unless they really have to, behave yourself) is going toe-to-toe with the music industry, which is an unfortunate sequence of events where you almost want no-one to win, but at least the music industry isn’t openly fash.

Twitter has filed an antitrust lawsuit against a number of music publishers and their trade org, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA). Twitter says that the companies and NMPA have been illegally colluding to try and make the social media company purchase industrywide licenses, or else they can’t host songs on there.

The suit was filed on January 9th, and it alleges that both the publishers and NMPA are trying to “leverage monopoly power” to make Twitter buy licenses from all music publishers at unfairly high rates, continuing that they’d “conspired to leverage their combined market power,” and acted to “coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from the industry as a whole, denying X the benefit of competition between music publishers.”

It is worth noting that all the other social media companies have already complied with these rules, so only Twitter are not currently playing ball.

Sony, Universal and Warner are some of the big hitters named in the bill, and in this suit, thousands of songs have been infringed on the platform.

NMPA president-CEO David Israelite has said “X/Twitter is the only major social media company that does not license the songs on its platform. 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.”

We’ll see how this rolls out as variously wealthy men swing their dicks in court. Meanwhile, musicians continue to miss out.