Elon Musk’s X accuses music publishers of collusion and anti-competitive conduct
Elon Musk took some time away from engineering the collapse of human civilisation last week to accuse the music publishers of America of anti-competitive conduct.
Musk’s X - or Twitter if you’re still insisting on calling it that - is the one big social media platform to have never bothered to secure licences from the music industry, despite plenty of users posting videos containing music. The music publishers sued X for copyright infringement in 2023 and that legal battle has been going through the motions ever since.
Now X is accusing the publishers of colluding through their US trade body, the National Music Publishers Association, to “leverage collective monopoly power and coerce X into acquiring licences from all music publishers at supracompetitive rates”.
NMPA and its members also swamped X with takedown notices relating to posts containing unlicensed music, which the social media company is obliged to respond to under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Despite claiming in its lawsuit that it has long operated a “robust DMCA compliance policy”, X seems to be annoyed at the high level of takedowns, seeing it as a tactic to force it into licensing deals.
Unsurprisingly, the NMPA says X’s lawsuit is “meritless”, calling it “a bad faith effort to distract from publishers’ and songwriters’ legitimate right to enforce against X’s illegal use of their songs”.
Judge dismisses Salt N Pepa’s termination rights lawsuit
A US judge has dismissed Salt N Pepa’s termination rights lawsuit against Universal Music. The rap duo sued the major in a bid to reclaim the copyrights in their 1980s recordings, exercising the termination right under US law that allows creators to terminate old deals in which they assigned copyrights to third parties.
Universal argued that Salt N Pepa couldn’t exercise the termination right, because when they started out they were hired by producer Hurby Azor whose company owned the copyrights in their work. He then entered into a deal with Next Plateau Records, which in turn allied with a label now owned by the major. Salt N Pepa themselves never assigned any rights to the label, so there is no assignment to terminate.
The rappers countered that agreements from 1986 could be read in a way that meant they did, in fact, initially own and then assign rights in their recordings. But judge Denise Cote disagrees. She wrote last week that, “even viewed in the light most favourable” to the rappers, those deals do not indicate they “ever owned the copyrights to the recordings or that they granted a transfer of those rights to anyone else”.
Universal welcomed the ruling but said the case “should never have been brought in the first place”, because it previously voluntarily offered to improve the terms of Salt N Pepa’s old record deals. The rappers told reporters that they “respectfully disagree” with Cote’s conclusions and plan to appeal.
Lucian Grainge’s annual memo
Staying with Universal Music, top dog Lucian Grainge sent out his traditional new year memo for employees last week. There was the usual breathless bragging, about how great he is, and about the innumerable successes at the biggest music rights company in the world over the last twelve months, although - curiously enough - not about the company’s cratering share price.
Alongside all that were Grainge’s customary musings on the music rights business more generally. The bragging is either boring, cringey or hilarious for anyone outside the Universal Music camp, but Grainge’s industry observations are usually discussed more widely.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of those observations relate to AI, which - Grainge insists - is still a major opportunity, so long as all the generative AI companies play ball and negotiate licensing deals with the music industry, and the streaming services effectively deal with all the “AI slop” now being pushed onto their platforms.
Universal has already signed a flurry of AI deals, of course, through which - Grainge reckons - the major is “protecting artists and songwriters and human creativity”. Which may or may not be true. The interests of Universal’s shareholders are definitely being protected, which may offer some small measure of comfort for the company’s investors against the underperforming share price.
Whether artists, songwriters and human creativity are protected too depends very much on how these new AI licensing deals will actually work, and that’s currently a closely guarded secret that Grainge isn’t willing to share with his employees, let alone actual artists and songwriters.
Grainge’s memo also returns - yet again - to the superfan opportunity that the majors, and Grainge in particular, were constantly hyping before everyone got distracted by AI. In 2026, he reveals, Universal will “accelerate” its efforts centred on better “serving superfans”. Though that mainly seems to involve encouraging streaming services to add super-premium tiers while running online artist stores and pop-up events, so don’t expect anything too revolutionary.
Nevertheless, maybe 2026 will finally be the year that the superfan opportunity begins to pay off. With only 576 working days left under Grainge’s current contract as CEO of Universal, and his $100 million megabonus yet to come good, he’s doubtless hoping that the hype works.
TikTok US sale to complete later this month
Just before the Christmas break, TikTok CEO Shou Chew told his employees that a deal had been agreed that will see the company’s US assets spun off into a standalone company controlled by American investors. That means TikTok will finally become compliant with the 2024 sell-or-be-banned law passed by US Congress, just over a year after the deadline American lawmakers originally set for a sale.
According to CNN, Chew’s memo explained that the new business will be 50% owned by a consortium of new investors including Oracle - the tech company co-founded by centibillionaire Larry Ellison, whose media mogul son David recently bid for Warner Bros through his Paramount Skydance media conglomerate - alongside private equity firm Silver Lake and Emirati-backed investment firm MGX.
Just over 30% of the shares in TikTok USA will be held by “affiliates” of companies that are investors in current TikTok owner Bytedance. Just under 20% will be owned by Bytedance itself.
Congress told China-based Bytedance to sell TikTok USA, otherwise the app would be banned within the US on 19 Jan 2025. The law was designed to allay concerns that the Chinese government has access to TikTok user-data via Bytedance. The ban actually went into effect for a few hours on 19 Jan last year, until Donald Trump arrived in the White House and approved the first of several deadline extensions.
Team Trump played an active role in negotiating the sale of TikTok USA and indicated several times last autumn that a deal was basically done. TikTok and Bytedance were much less committal about the success of deal negotiations throughout, but Chew’s memo confirmed that the spinning off of TikTok USA was underway, stating that the transaction should complete by 22 Jan.
Another memo last week confirmed that many - though not all - of TikTok’s US-based employees will start working for the new company.
More Spotify backlash
The Spotify backlash that gained momentum in 2025 seems likely to continue in 2026, even though it is no longer running recruitment ads for the US government’s Immigration And Customs Enforcement agency, which has been one of various gripes against the streaming service in recent months.
With the conduct of ICE becoming ever more controversial, a Spotify spokesperson said last week that “there are currently no ICE ads running” on the platform. Although that’s seemingly because the ad campaign previously paid for by the US government has reached its conclusion, rather than Spotify pulling the ads off its platform.
When asked by Paste whether future ICE ads could still run, a spokesperson said, “I can’t speculate on hypothetical future campaigns but any future ads need to adhere to the company’s policies”. Which sounds almost as though “future ads” might not run, until you realise - as Paste notes - Spotify previously insisted that the past ICE recruitment ads complied with its policies.
Just before Christmas, the other big Spotify talking point related to the news that pirate activist group Anna’s Archive had managed to scrape 86 million music files and 256 million rows of metadata from the streaming service’s platform, with the plan to make all that content and data available as part of a “humble attempt” to begin a “preservation archive for music”.
Although not as catastrophic for the music industry as some commentators claimed - most of that music is almost certainly available to grab on the internet already if you really want it - it was still an embarrassing hack for Spotify, which quickly announced that it had “identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping” and launched an investigation.