Wixen Music Publishing certainly isn’t scared of tangling legally with big tech and streaming companies: it has sued Spotify, Pandora and Triller in the past.

A 2018 licensing deal suggested Meta (then Facebook) was in its good books, but the relationship has clearly soured. Wixen is now suing the social-media giant claiming that it wants to “drastically cut payments to human songwriters”.

Billboard broke the news of a lawsuit focusing on a breakdown in negotiations for Wixen’s deals with Instagram and Facebook covering their licensed song libraries.

The lawsuit slams “exploitative, below-industry rates” offered by Meta, and accuses the company of removing some recordings of songs owned by Wixen before its previous deal elapsed, and telling artist managers who complained that it was the publisher’s fault “to strong-arm Wixen into accepting drastically reduced rates”.

Meta has yet to comment, but Wixen CEO Jason Rys sought to draw a link between the company offering reduced rates and its work in AI music, which could ultimately compete with copyrighted recordings (and thus songs) on its platforms.