X is the only major social media platform without a music license. Now it's suing to keep it that way.
In January 2026, X filed an antitrust lawsuit against 18 music publishers and the NMPA, claiming publishers weaponized the DMCA's takedown process to pressure the platform into industry-wide licensing deals at inflated rates. Sony, Universal, and Warner are all named.
The NMPA started sending thousands of takedown notices per week in 2021. X's position: that wasn't copyright enforcement, it was a coordinated squeeze play. X says it's willing to negotiate directly with individual publishers. Publishers have refused, insisting on a blanket deal for the whole industry.
The publishers aren't buying that framing. NMPA president David Israelite called the lawsuit a "bad faith effort to distract from publishers' and songwriters' legitimate right to enforce against X's illegal use of their songs."
Every other major platform — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Roblox, all of them — eventually signed licensing deals. X hasn't. When Musk took over, he walked away from talks Twitter had been in, reportedly deciding the fees were too high for a platform that doesn't center music. Publishers sued X in 2023 for up to $250 million over alleged infringement of 1,700 songs. Settlement talks got close last November, then collapsed.
That case goes to trial in February 2027. X's antitrust suit is a separate filing running alongside it.
The legal argument isn't without teeth; one antitrust expert told Bloomberg Law it has a pretty good chance of surviving a motion to dismiss. But surviving a motion to dismiss and winning are different things. Every platform that tried to wait out the music industry eventually paid. X is betting it can change the terms of how that happens. I'm not convinced the court is going to help it do that.
