X Doesn’t Pay for Music. That’s Crazy—and It Won’t Last.

X lets music power its videos, memes, commentary, fan edits, sports clips, promotional posts, and viral moments.

It sells advertising beside that engagement.

It sells subscriptions to users who upload and circulate that engagement.

It wants to become a video platform, a creator platform, a payment platform, and apparently an everything platform.

But when the music industry asks where the license is, X responds like the song wandered onto the platform by itself.

That is crazy.

Not legally simple.

Not entirely unprecedented.

But crazy.

Every major technology platform eventually learns the same lesson: if music helps make your product valuable, the people who own and create the music will eventually demand a piece of that value.

X seems determined to learn it through litigation.

My prediction is simple:

X will have to pay for music.

Maybe not through the exact deal publishers originally demanded. Maybe not at the rate they wanted. Maybe not under the legal theory they first used.

But X cannot become a serious video platform while treating music licensing as an optional expense forever.

X Wants the Benefits Without the Bill

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, the company reportedly explored music-licensing agreements.

After the acquisition, those negotiations stopped.

The business argument was understandable: Twitter was not TikTok. Music was not the center of the product. Users primarily posted text, news, jokes, links, arguments, and short clips. Why should Twitter pay licensing rates designed for services where music drives the entire experience?

That argument made more sense when Twitter behaved like Twitter.

X no longer wants to be Twitter.

X has pushed longer video, creator monetization, livestreaming, premium uploads, vertical video, and algorithmic recommendations. It wants users to stay inside the app and consume media instead of clicking away.

The more X becomes a video platform, the weaker its “music is only incidental here” argument becomes.

Music is not incidental to video culture.

It carries the edit.

It creates the mood.

It makes the joke work.

It gives the clip emotional shorthand.

It helps users discover the post.

It keeps people watching.

You cannot chase the engagement model of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube while pretending the soundtrack belongs to a text-only message board.

The DMCA Is a Shield, Not a Music License

X has relied on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe-harbor framework.

In simplified terms, an online platform may receive protection from liability for material uploaded by users if it meets statutory requirements, including responding to valid takedown notices and dealing appropriately with repeat infringers.

That framework matters. Without it, platforms could face impossible liability for every unlawful file a user uploads.

But safe harbor is not the same thing as permission.

A takedown system says:

We did not authorize this upload, and we will remove it when properly notified.

A license says:

Our users are allowed to use this music under negotiated terms, and the rights holders will be compensated.

Those are entirely different products.

X appears to want the cultural benefits of the second system while paying for the administrative obligations of the first.

That may sometimes be legally defensible.

It is still a terrible foundation for a music ecosystem.

Creators need certainty. Users need usable music libraries. Advertisers need brand safety. Songwriters need compensation. Platforms need to know which content can remain available.

A business built around constant takedowns is not a music strategy.

It is a permanent argument.

The Publishers Sued First

In 2023, seventeen music publishers sued X in federal court in Tennessee. They alleged infringement involving roughly 1,700 songs and sought damages that could exceed $250 million.

Their complaint argued that X benefited from infringing music uploaded by users while failing to enforce its own rules adequately. The publishers contrasted X with platforms that had negotiated music licenses.

X disputed those claims.

A federal judge dismissed some of the publishers’ theories in 2024 but allowed parts of the case to continue. The court did not declare that X was generally liable for everything users uploaded. It left a more specific question alive: whether X could face contributory liability if it knowingly withheld enforcement against users who repeatedly used the platform as an infringement tool.

That is an important distinction.

X is not automatically liable because somebody posts a copyrighted song.

But “the user did it” is not an unlimited defense if a platform knows what is happening, profits from the activity, and selectively refuses to apply its own policies.

Then X Sued the Music Industry

In January 2026, X changed from defendant to plaintiff.

It sued the National Music Publishers’ Association and major publishers in federal court in Texas, accusing them of an antitrust conspiracy.

X alleged that the publishers coordinated through the NMPA, refused to negotiate independently, shared licensing information, and weaponized enormous waves of DMCA notices to pressure X into buying an industrywide license at inflated rates.

That accusation is not frivolous merely because songwriters deserve payment.

Competitors generally cannot coordinate to eliminate competition and force a buyer to accept supracompetitive terms. If publishers agreed not to negotiate individually, synchronized pricing, or used enforcement collectively as leverage for a licensing package, a court could scrutinize that behavior.

The music industry has enormous concentration and bargaining power.

X was entitled to challenge how that power was used.

But the antitrust complaint did not answer the underlying copyright question.

Even if the publishers negotiated improperly, X users were still posting music.

Even if the NMPA coordinated aggressively, songwriters still owned compositions.

Even if X deserved competitive offers, the correct price was not automatically zero.

The Lawsuits Quietly Ended

Here is what the January coverage could not know.

In July 2026, X and the publishers ended both cases.

The publishers dismissed their copyright lawsuit.

X dismissed its antitrust lawsuit.

Both dismissals were filed with prejudice, meaning the parties cannot simply revive those same claims later. Each side agreed to bear its own costs and attorneys’ fees.

The public filings did not disclose the underlying terms.

That means we should not invent a winner.

A dismissal does not prove X paid a settlement.

It does not prove X secured a license.

It does not prove the publishers admitted collusion.

It does not prove X’s unlicensed approach was vindicated.

It proves that both sides decided ending the litigation was better than continuing it.

Maybe there was a confidential business understanding.

Maybe changes in copyright precedent altered the risks.

Maybe both sides saw weaknesses in their cases.

Maybe the cost of discovery and trial became larger than the expected reward.

We do not know.

The legal war ended.

The business problem did not.

You Cannot Build an “Everything App” on “Not My Problem”

X’s position reflects a larger pattern in technology.

A platform builds value from other people’s work.

The work drives attention.

The attention drives revenue.

When the creator asks to be paid, the platform points to scale, user behavior, technical architecture, safe harbors, innovation, or the unreasonable cost of licensing.

Every individual excuse may contain some truth.

Together, they become a business model: privatize the engagement and externalize the rights bill.

Music is especially vulnerable because one song may involve multiple layers of ownership:

The musical composition
The lyrics
The sound recording
Publishing rights
Performance rights
Mechanical rights
Synchronization rights
Artist and label agreements

Licensing is complicated.

Complicated does not mean optional.

X would never accept “your payment system is too complicated” as a reason for advertisers to run campaigns without paying.

It would never accept “your subscription terms are expensive” as permission to use Premium features for free.

It would not let another company copy X’s code, branding, or proprietary data and dismiss the problem as ordinary user behavior.

Property suddenly becomes philosophical when the property belongs to somebody else.

Songwriters Are Not Record Labels

Criticism of the music industry is justified.

Labels and publishers have exploited artists.

Contracts can be predatory.

Accounting can be opaque.

Ownership is concentrated.

Licensing systems are unnecessarily complex.

Collective bargaining can become anticompetitive.

But none of that makes songs free.

A songwriter may receive a small fraction of the value a song creates. That is an argument for improving compensation, not eliminating it.

When a copyrighted song makes a post funnier, more moving, more searchable, more shareable, or more valuable to advertisers, the composition contributed to the product.

The platform knows this.

The user knows this.

The audience knows this.

The only disagreement is whether the invoice should arrive.

“X Uses Less Music” Should Affect the Price, Not Erase It

X has a legitimate negotiating point.

Its music usage is not identical to TikTok’s.

A platform where music is the central discovery engine should not necessarily pay under the same structure as a platform where music appears in a smaller portion of posts.

Licenses can reflect scale, usage, territory, feature design, catalog access, monetization, and duration.

That is what negotiation is for.

If X uses less music, negotiate a smaller deal.

If only certain video products need music, license those products.

If publishers demand bundled terms that eliminate competition, challenge the bundling.

If users need only a limited catalog, license a limited catalog.

If X wants music available only to paying creators, build the cost into Premium.

There are many possible structures between “pay whatever the industry demands” and “pay nothing.”

X keeps behaving as though those are the only two choices.

They are not.

Video Will Force the Issue

My prediction is not based on sympathy.

It is based on product direction.

The more X prioritizes video, the more users will upload copyrighted music.

The more it pays creators for engagement, the harder it becomes to say the platform has no financial connection to music-driven posts.

The more advertisers appear beside viral clips, the more obvious the commercial value becomes.

The more X competes with licensed platforms, the less credible its exceptional status looks.

And the more AI-generated music enters the feed, the more complicated the rights problem becomes—not less. AI songs can implicate compositions, recordings, voice likenesses, training data, and synthetic imitations all at once.

X can avoid a blanket agreement today.

It cannot avoid the music economy forever.

Eventually it will need some combination of:

Direct publishing licenses
Label agreements
A licensed music library
Revenue sharing
Better rights-management technology
Stronger repeat-infringer enforcement
Creator-side licensing tools
Geographic restrictions
More transparent attribution and claims systems

Litigation may delay that system.

It cannot substitute for it.

Elon May Hate Paying, but Music Is Not Free

Elon Musk built his reputation by questioning costs other executives accepted automatically.

Sometimes that discipline exposes waste.

Sometimes it reveals that an “industry standard” is merely a powerful group charging what it can.

And sometimes a bill exists because somebody else created the thing your business is using.

Music licensing belongs in the third category.

X should absolutely negotiate.

It should resist collusion.

It should demand rates proportionate to actual usage.

It should refuse abusive contract terms.

It should modernize an unnecessarily confusing licensing market.

But it should stop pretending that removing a song after it has already created millions of impressions is equivalent to paying the people who made it.

The song did its work before the takedown arrived.

The post got the views.

The advertiser got the attention.

The platform got the activity.

The songwriter got a notice.

That arrangement will not hold.

The lawsuits may have ended quietly, but the economics are still screaming.

X does not get to become a video giant on a soundtrack it refuses to license.

My prediction stands:

X will have to pay for the music.