Twitter now suing every major music publisher over monopoly allegations

The Musk-owned social media site is claiming music publishers are using "monopoly power" to negotiate music licensing fees.

By William Hughes | January 9, 2026 | 6:35pm

Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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Twitter now suing every major music publisher over monopoly allegations

The question of who gets paid what when folks on social media post copyrighted music is a long and tangled one—albeit one that’s mostly been resolved by this point, via the generation of a whole bunch of licensing deals between the major social media platforms, the various big-name music publishers, and the National Music Publishers’ Association, the trade organization that usually takes the lead when said publishers want to throw their collective weight around. The collective nature of said weight, though, has now become the subject of a new lawsuit that’s just been launched against basically every music publisher in America—including the biggies, Warner Bros., Universal, and Sony—by X/Twitter, which is claiming it’s being strong-armed into signing licensing deals using “monopoly power.”

This is per Variety, which has been reporting for a few years now on Twitter’s drawn-out legal fight with the music business. See, the Elon Musk-owned social media company is the one major social media platform that doesn’t have an NMPA licensing deal, a fact that was, among other things, the subject of a separate lawsuit from the group two years ago. The various organizations entered into negotiations last year, setting aside the lawsuit for a time, but those talks seem to have broken down. Today, the social media service launched an antitrust suit of its own against the NMPA and its various members, claiming they’re trying to “coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from the industry as a whole, denying X the benefit of competition between music publishers.” Essentially, the suit argues, by negotiating as a group, the NMPA members have formed a multi-company monopoly, and denied X the ability to strike individual license agreements with its members.

The lawsuit says Twitter is seeking the ability to bargain with publishers individually, as well as some unspecified damages. The NMPA—which has been aggressive in going after social media platforms in recent years, leading to the creation of all those aforementioned deals—has already fired back, calling the lawsuit a “bad faith effort to distract from publishers’ and songwriters’ legitimate right to enforce against X’s illegal use of their songs.”

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