On Thursday (August 6), Universal Music Group and Sony Music Group announced they are commencing legal proceedings in Canada against the developers of Musi, an app that streams music sourced directly from YouTube without authorization from artists, labels, or YouTube itself. The action is coordinated by the IFPI and its Canadian national group Music Canada, which represents the three major labels in Canada. According to the joint announcement, confirmed by Music Canada, the proceedings allege that Musi is making copyright-protected sound recordings available to the public without authorization and deliberately circumventing the technical protections YouTube uses to guard its content. The litigation is the most direct legal challenge yet to a category of app that has existed for years in a legal grey zone: platforms that use YouTube’s open infrastructure to build competing streaming experiences without paying for a license or sharing revenue with the artists whose music drives their user base.
Musi was founded in 2013 by two Canadian teenagers and built a remarkably large audience precisely because it offered something no licensed streaming service could: free, ad-light access to YouTube’s full music library. The app had been downloaded from the App Store at least 66 million times as of early 2024, making it one of the most popular unofficial streaming apps in history. Its business model charged users for subscriptions and advertising, generating revenue from copyrighted content without compensating rights holders. Apple removed the app from the App Store in September 2024 following pressure from Sony, IFPI, and the National Music Publishers Association, but users who had already downloaded it retained access, meaning the platform remained functional for an enormous installed base even after removal. Musi sued Apple over the 2024 removal, but a federal judge dismissed the case in March 2026, ruling that Apple’s Developer Program License Agreement gives it the broad right to stop offering any app at any time with notice, and sanctioning Musi’s law firm for a factually baseless allegation. The Canadian lawsuit is now the primary remaining legal front against the app itself.
IFPI CEO Victoria Oakley set the tone for what the labels are arguing this action represents beyond the Musi case specifically. “We are serving notice on parasitic apps, which are designed specifically to exploit artists and their music, and undermine legitimate music services,” she said in the joint statement. “Musi and similar illegal services have no place in today’s music ecosystem which is built on the premise of empowering innovation through licensing. This legal action is an important step, and we hope it will be further supported by effective, direct action from the mobile app stores and the music services being directly exploited by these apps.” That last sentence is the most pointed: IFPI is explicitly calling on Apple and Google to take more aggressive action to prevent similar apps from reaching their platforms in the first place, rather than relying on rights holder complaints to trigger removal after the fact.
