Wixen Music Publishing has sued Meta in California federal court, claiming the company kept offering hundreds of Wixen-controlled songs on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp after their licence ran out, Music Business Worldwide reports. The complaint, filed on January 23, covers 331 works, among them songs by The Doors, Weezer, Styx, The Black Keys, Missy Elliott and Townes Van Zandt. The Los Angeles publisher calls the infringement wilful.
Wixen had licensed its catalogue to Meta since March 2018. It says renewal talks collapsed in 2025 when Meta tried to cut rates to a small fraction of earlier payments, and that after the deal expired on December 10, 2025 the songs stayed in the music library users draw on for Reels, with screenshots showing tracks such as Light My Fire and Mr. Roboto still searchable. To show what is at stake, the suit cites Instagram's 3 billion monthly users, Meta's own forecast that Reels would bring in $50 billion of advertising over a year, and $161 billion in total ad revenue for 2024.
The publisher links Meta's bargaining stance to AI. It alleges Meta is cutting payments to songwriters because it wants AI-made tracks that carry no royalties to take the place of songs by people who must be paid, pointing to the company's AI spending and its AudioCraft text-to-music tool as a threat to artists' livelihoods. It also says Meta removed some clients' music while the licence was still in force, then wrongly told them Wixen was to blame, which it calls a pressure campaign.
Wixen is asking for the $150,000 statutory maximum for each of the 331 works, at least $49.65 million in total, plus at least $20 million for defamation and interference and an injunction. It argues the result will shape how other social platforms handle music royalties.
Sources · 1