Twitter Talked about Music Licensing, Then Elon Happened

Twitter has been making headlines ever since Elon Musk acquired the social media giant for $44 billion back in October of 2022. Since then, we’ve seen a myriad of issues, but recently, a new one has come to light. Twitter had been in the talks with three major labels - Universal, Sony, and Warner - to acquire music licensing rights for creators on the platform to use.

Why didn’t it happen? A lot of people seemed to blame Elon Musk and his rather “heavy-handed” approach turned these companies off, but it really came down to a couple factors.

A lot of Twitter’s corporate moves were based off finances (typical). The cost for a top-tier social media platform to secure those creative rights, can well be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which is something Twitter couldn’t do at the time as they were cutting hundreds of millions in expenses. Twitter’s internal firestorms, post Elon, also rang some alarm bells for the labels, and over the course of the massive layoffs, the people in charge of acquiring these rights, were fired. This left a lot of the music labels “very few” contacts at Twitter, and ultimately sank the idea.

Labels saw Musk’s purchase of Twitter as a changing of the guard, and were more optimistic to this deal getting done than in the past.

I guess we’ll have to wait for Elon to cash those “Twitter blue check” checks.

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/technology/twitters-music-elon-musk