Wixen Music Publishing Sues Meta for $70M Over Royalties

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Wixen Music Publishing alleges that Meta wants to “drastically cut payments to human songwriters” and replace them with free AI-generated music.

Wixen Music Publishing is suing Meta with allegations that the social media company is aiming to “drastically cut payments to human songwriters” and replace them with royalty-free, AI-generated music. As a result of calling them out on it, the publisher accuses Meta of bad-mouthing them to the wider music business.

Since its licensing agreement with Meta expired last month, Wixen claims that Meta has continued to reproduce and distribute over a thousand copyrighted musical works via Instagram Reels, Facebook, and WhatsApp without authorization or compensation.

Filed on Friday, Wixen’s lawsuit says the reason for the termination of their partnership stemmed from Meta attempting to “drastically cut” royalties for human songwriters to a fraction of its previous rates—because it plans to replace human-created music with royalty-free, AI-generated content created by its in-house “AudioCraft” tool. As a result, the two companies parted ways over the matter.

“Meta’s success or failure at slashing royalties now will have a profound effect on how other social media platforms approach music royalties,” the lawsuit reads. “Given these serious implications for its clients, Wixen refused to accept the exploitative, below-industry rates for its clients.”

But in a strange turn, Meta is also accused of trying to “strong-arm” Wixen by muting content and telling their clients that Wixen was forcing the content to be muted or removed. This, according to Wixen’s legal team, was a move to pressure the publisher into acquiescing to Meta’s requests to lower their rates. Wixen says clients terminated their business relationships with the publisher as a result of the muting and removals on Meta-owned platforms.

“Meta made these false statements with the malicious intent to strong-arm Wixen into accepting drastically reduced rates,” the filing reads. “By disseminating these falsehoods to the managers of Wixen’s clients, including many prominent managers in the music business, Meta painted a false and damaging picture of Wixen to a broad swath of clients and potential clients.”

Wixen represents artists including The Black Keys, Santana, and Weezer. The lawsuit accuses Meta of copyright infringement, defamation, trade libel—which is a form of defamation committed against a business—and illegal interference with Wixen’s contractual relationships with its clients. The publisher is seeking $50 million in damages for the copyright infringement, as well as $20 million for defamation and other claims.