Apple Fires Back Against 'Parasitic' Music App in Lawsuit

After Musi developers filed a lawsuit for breach of contract and seeking the app to be reinstated to the App Store, Apple's lawyers have responded to the lawsuit. They seek a denial of the preliminary injunction that would force Apple to allow Musi back onto the App Store. Here's why.

Apple lawyers state that the decision was not made in a vacuum or quickly—citing evidence of a lack of interactions between Musi and YouTube. YouTube says it reached out to Musi developers several times about the nature of the app, which serves as a wrapper for YouTube content to serve up its own ads while removing those supplied by YouTube. Industry groups IFPI and NMPA have supported YouTube in its efforts to see Musi removed from the App Store.

“By removing the Musi app from its only viable distribution platform, Apple has exiled Musi from its customer base—thereby threatening the company's survival,” Musi's original lawsuit reads. “Musi is therefore entitled to a preliminary injunction to stop Apple from continuing to breach the developer agreement by refusing to list or otherwise making unavailable the Musi app.”

Apple's lawyers answered to those complaints on November 15, opposing the request for a preliminary injunction. They argue that Apple's developer program terms allow it to delist any apps “at any time, with or without cause.” But the lawyers also address Musi's complaint that Apple responded in YouTube's favor without consulting it.

The lawsuit contains the letter sent to Apple from the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) that details how Musi utilizes free YouTube API tokens to avoid paying licensing fees—serving their own ads instead of YouTube ads (against YouTube's own ToS).

“Musi uses multiple API tokens and applies users into buckets per token and then moves users once [that token] is banned by YouTube. This allows Musi to exceed YouTube rate limits and scale without needing a commercial API account,” the NMPA allegations. This would explain why Musi users regularly post in the Musi_app subreddit complaining about rate limits. The Musi_Support account will respond asking the user to 'try again' with the issue magically fixed.

“Musi interacts with YouTube's API by hardcoding all of its requests from an iPhone 15 to 'iPhone 12' as the user agent. The YouTube API is an iframe of the video. There are a few libraries where an app can pull the underlying video. From there Musi lays its own ads over YouTube's ads. Musi uses Applovin to overlay the video ads.”

Apple lawyers argue that because the Musi app is only pulled for new usersit can continue to generate revenue from those who downloaded it. The app generates millions of dollars of advertising revenue per month, with Apple arguing that there is no evidence that the app is in financial trouble.

“Public reporting suggests that Musi earned more than $100 million in advertising revenue between January 2023 and Spring 2024. [The app] employs ten people at most. If true (Musi provides no evidence that it is not), Musi is not at imminent risk of extinction,” the lawyers write.

Musi has yet to respond to the new filing, although current Musi users in the subreddit appear to be seeking alternatives. New topics include users seeking to migrate their Music playlists to Apple Music or YouTube Music— so the app removal is having the intended effect.