Our songwriting clients write the music that soundtracks many of Meta’s Instagram and Facebook Reels. Meta licensed our clients’ music for seven years, from 2018 until 2025. Then it decided it would pay only a small fraction of what it had been paying for the same music. We said no.
Meta kept using the music anyway. No license and no payment. It also started pulling our clients’ songs down while they were still under license, then told songwriters and their managers that we were the ones who took them down. That’s why we filed suit, and it’s why so much of our clients’ music is no longer up on Meta’s platforms.
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Nobody wanted that outcome, least of all songwriters whose fans live on Instagram. But to us, Meta’s message was clear: It does not value the music that helped build its platforms. We do.
Meta’s first move in court: try to get the case thrown out before anyone has to answer for anything. Earlier this month, the judge ruled on that motion, and the headlines said he “tossed” our suit. He didn’t. Here’s what actually happened.
Meta’s motion never claimed it had a license. It never claimed it wasn’t using the songs. It argued about whose name is on the paperwork, and on that, the judge asked us to spell out, song by song, whether Wixen owns each work or is its exclusive licensee, and which rights we hold. That’s a pleading exercise. We did the same thing in our earlier 2020 case against Triller. That case went forward, and the judge cited it in his order. He gave us two weeks to refile, and we did. Our claims over Meta pulling songs down mid-license and blaming us for it were left alone.
The trial date is still on the calendar. Discovery is underway, and we expect it to turn up even more of our clients’ music used without a license.
Under a much-criticized Ninth Circuit rule from prior copyright infringement cases — a rule which now covers California — a publishing administrator must exclusively control 100% of a song to bring a claim. This is out of step with every other court that has looked at the question. We conceded that prior ruling in our briefs and kept those partially controlled songs in the case so we can take it up on appeal.
Think about what the rule means: If a song has two co-writers with two different publishing administrators, Meta can use it for free, and neither publisher can stop it. Most songs are co-written.
In our lawyers’ words, the ruling does not diminish our case in any way. Meta got a two-week delay. It did not get an answer to the only question that matters: whether it can use songwriters’ work without paying for it. It’s going to have to answer that one in front of a jury.
Big Tech loves to hide behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s liability shields that Congress wrote in the 1990s for message boards, not for trillion-dollar companies. But our case isn’t even a safe-harbor case, which is why Meta’s motion never mentioned one. The music in Reels isn’t something users sneak onto the platform. Meta itself offers it, from a music library it builds and has to license up front, and for seven years it did. There’s no law to hide behind here. Just a decision to stop paying and keep using the music.
Meta’s recent child-harm settlement proves it can change the way it operates. So, what would taking responsibility look like for music? Something almost embarrassingly modest: license the music you use and fairly pay the people who wrote it. That’s it. A rounding error for a nearly $1.5 trillion company, and something every other business that uses music, every bar, every gym, every TV network, has managed to figure out. Instead, with short-form video usage exploding and music a huge part of why people watch, Meta chose this exact moment to slash what it pays for music. All while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI data centers, in part to generate music so it can replace human songwriters and artists with synthetic substitutes.
Meta changed when 47 states stood up to it. Songwriters don’t have attorneys general. We have copyright law, and we’re using it. But it shouldn’t take a lawsuit. Responsibility shouldn’t have to be litigated out of a company one harm at a time. It could get back to being a partner to the songwriters and artists whose work fills its platforms, and set the example for the rest of Big Tech while it’s at it. That was the right thing to do from the start. It still is. So do it, Meta. Take responsibility for the songwriters and artists who helped build your success, too. We’ll be here until you do. We’ve got a court date that says so.
Jason Rys is the CEO of Wixen Music Publishing, an independent publishing administrator based in Calabasas, California that was founded in 1978 by Randall Wixen. The company represents more than 2,000 songwriters and recording artists across every genre, including The Doors, Janis Joplin, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, Rage Against the Machine, Weezer, Missy Elliott, The Black Keys and Andrew Bird. Wixen built its reputation on meticulous royalty review, aggressive copyright enforcement and an active sync team placing clients’ songs in film, TV, trailers, ads and games, with clients always retaining ownership of their work. It operates worldwide, with a London sister office, Wixen Music UK.
