The golden age of using any and all songs on TikTok and Insta reels might well be over – for brands. Music labels are cracking down on the free use of music in social media posts.
As Social Media Today put it: “An important reminder: Brands cannot use commercial music tracks, without explicit, specific permission for such, in their social media posts, even if those tracks are available as options within the post creation tools.”
A rising amount of copyright infringement cases against brands using unlicensed music in their promotions. Unfortunately, this does include social media marketing. So, the next time you’re looking at a trend on TikTok and want to get in while the hashtag is still relevant, you might want to remember Bang.
As reported by Bloomberg Law: “Energy drink maker, Bang, achieved enormous marketing success through its aggressive and flashy social media strategy that used popular influencers to advertise its drinks on TikTok and Instagram Reels. But the company didn’t obtain a license to use the music in more than 100 of its videos, and it was hit with copyright lawsuits from all three of the major US record labels. A federal judge this year ruled in favour of the labels in two of those cases.”
Major labels are calling for more copyright enforcement on social media, akin to that of YouTube, where labels, until recently, could claim revenue on any video using their licensed music. Recently YouTube has allowed creators more options, like cutting out the segment of the song be it on an edited video or a stream.
But now, it seems TikTok is the focus of labels.
Photo credit: Tshirt Superstar – Music
