The platform formerly known as Twitter, X, has raised the price of its X Premium subscription by nearly 40% as it attempts to bolster creator payouts.

The increase in the price of X Premium came on December 21, raising prices in the United States from $16 per month to $22. The annual cost of an X Premium subscription jumped from $168 to $229—leading some users to question whether the service will be worth it in 2025. The increased prices may help the platform deal with its copyright infringement lawsuit filed by 17 music publishers back in 2023.

Of course, the United States isn’t the only country where X raised the price of its Premium offering. European countries like France, Germany, and Spain also saw significant increases—from €16 to €21. The higher subscription pricing is effective immediately upon the next billing cycle for new subscribers, while those on the old prices are grandfathered in until January 20 when Trump takes office.

The X basic subscription tier remains unaffected by the price hike. This price hike is the highest price increase since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022. Musk says the price hike is justified because they retooled the X Premium offering to be completely ad-free, which he describes as a “significant enhancement.”

The move comes after X changed how its revenue sharing program would work with creators on the platform. Subscriptions now “directly fuel” creator payouts in order to reward those who create engaging content. Premium Plus subscribers also receive priority support, the trend monitoring tool, and higher use limits on Grok AI models.

That group of music publishers who sued Twitter/X back in 2023 are seeking as much as $250 million in copyright infringement damages for around 1,700 songs. “Twitter stands alone as the largest social media platform that has completely refused to license the millions of songs on its service,” says David Israelite, the President of the National Music Publishers’ Association.

Music publishers accuse X of rampant infringement of music copyrights, pointing to specific tweets in which their music was used without permission. That lawsuit seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each of the nearly 1,700 infringed works named in the case. The NMPA says it has alerted Twitter/X to nearly 300,000 tweets with infringing music since December 2021. Twitter/X failed to act in taking down those tweets, leaving them up.

Twitter was in negotiations with Universal, Sony, and Warner before Musk purchased the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Those talks then stalled and have been unproductive since Musk has made the social media platform his new pet project.