Wixen Music Publishing is suing Meta over accusations that the social media giant is trying to “drastically cut payments to human songwriters” and replace them with free A.I. music – and that it’s now retaliating by smearing the publisher to the music business.
In a lawsuit filed Friday, Wixen says licensing negotiations for Instagram and Facebook stalled last year because Meta was offering only a small fraction of what it used to pay songwriters whose music is featured in the platforms’ licensed song libraries.
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The publisher, which reresents Weezer, The Black Keys, Santana and many other major artists, says that’s because Meta is planning to replace human-generated music on its huge platforms with “royalty-free AI-generated music.”
“Meta’s success or failure at slashing royalties now will have a profound effect on how other social media platforms approach music royalties,” Wixen’s attorneys write in the Friday lawsuit, obtained by Billboard. “Given these serious implications for its clients, Wixen refused to accept the exploitative, below-industry rates for its clients.”
Facing that impasse, Wixen says Meta then retaliated by unilaterally removing some songs, even though the existing licensing deal had not yet expired – a move clearly designed “to damage Wixen’s relations with its clients.” And when some artists noticed that their music had disappeared, Wixen says Meta lied and told them it was the publisher’s fault.
“Meta made these false statements with the malicious intent to strong-arm Wixen into accepting drastically reduced rates,” the company’s lawyers write. “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.”
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A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.
Like most large music publishers, Wixen has for years licensed its songs to Meta and other top social media platforms, allowing millions of users to easily add the publisher’s tracks to videos. But the company’s deal with Meta, signed in 2018, was set to expire last year, according to the lawsuit.
When the two sides began negotiating an extension last March, Wixen says Meta offered only a “drastically lower license fee.” That’s because, Wixen says, the Silicon Valley giant has invested “hundreds of billions of dollars” into AI and has big plans for the new tech when it comes to music.
“These staggering financial commitments come as Meta is building its new artificial intelligence tool, AudioCraft, which generates music from text prompts and directly threatens the future and livelihood of musical artists,” Wixen says.
When Wixen refused those terms, it says Meta turned to “unscrupulous and ultimately illegal tactics” to coerce the publisher. That allegedly started with removing some of the publisher’s music from Instagram and Facebook, since it “knew that many Wixen clients value having their music available” via a “tech behemoth with outsized market share.”
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Unsurprisingly, the publisher’s artists started reaching out to ask why their music had been pulled. When they did so, Wixen says Meta lied to them and said it had been the publisher’s choice to mute and block the songs.
“Meta … maligned Wixen and blamed it for Meta’s own actions, in the hopes that Wixen clients would complain and even leave, and that potential clients would avoid hiring Wixen,” the company says. “Meta’s lies caused damage and extreme disruption to Wixen’s reputation, business, and services to its clients.”
Some artists did leave the publisher so that their music could be restored on Facebook and Instagram, Wixen says. But Meta allegedly later blocked even those songs, falsely claiming it was because Wixen had filed continued claims to those songs: “By disseminating these falsehoods to music managers, Meta knew that it would adversely affect Wixen’s relationships and reputation across the music industry.”
Now, with the licensing deal fully terminated, Wixen says Meta is “ironically” continuing to use the publisher’s songs without any kind of agreement at all – a move that the lawsuit claims subjects the platform to millions in copyright infringement damages.
“Meta knows that artists and their music, including the Works, are irreplaceable,” the lawsuit reads. “[The] future, and the present, must include Meta paying content creators fairly.”
In technical legal terms, the lawsuit accuses Meta of copyright infringement, defamation, trade libel (a form of defamation committed against a business), and illegal interference with Wixen’s contractual relationship with its clients.
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