The major music publishers have agreed to end their long-running lawsuit against Elon Musk’s X over copyrighted music on the social media platform.
Publishing units of Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment teamed up in 2024 to sue X (formerly Twitter) — the only major social media site that refused to sign a blanket licensing deal for music shared by its users. X later countersued, accusing the publishers of violating antitrust laws by colluding against it.
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But in a pair of court filings on Thursday (July 16), both sides said they would voluntarily dismiss their lawsuits against the other. The filings did not disclose any specific terms of any settlement deal, and neither side immediately returned requests for comment or more details.
Led by the National Music Publishers’ Association, the publishers teamed up in 2024 to sue X, which has long held out against licensing music directly. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have all paid to enter into such deals, giving their users a licensed library of songs to easily add to their videos.
Before the case was filed, NMPA head David Israelite called X his “top legal focus.” He accused it of “hiding behind” the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the federal law that limits how websites can be sued over copyright infringement by their users. The DMCA only requires sites to pull down individual flagged posts, which can quickly be reposted.
That case claimed that users on X, operating without such a license, had infringed more than 1,700 songs from writers like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé — claims that could have led to $255 million in damages.
In 2024, a judge refused to dismiss the case and allowed it to move ahead toward trial. The case was then largely paused for settlement talks, but resumed in November after the two sides said they were “unable to complete a settlement.”
In January, X turned the tables with an aggressive legal counter-punch, accusing the NMPA and the publishers of sweeping antitrust violations by working together against the site in a “conspiracy to leverage collective monopoly power.” It claimed the publishers had “weaponized” takedown requests, inundating the company with hundreds of thousands of such demands after it refused to their terms.
That case remained in its earliest stages when Thursday’s deal was struck.
The full list of the publishers involved in the litigation includes Concord, Universal Music Publishing Group, peermusic, ABKCO Music, Anthem Entertainment, Big Machine Music, BMG Rights Management, Hipgnosis Songs Group, Kobalt Music Publishing America, Mayimba Music, Reservoir Media Management, Sony Music Publishing, Spirit Music Group, The Royalty Network, Ultra Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and Wixen Music Publishing.
