‘Like the Wild West’: Why Music Companies Are Cracking Down on Corporate Social Media

You open up TikTok or Instagram. The first video is a creator dancing to “Lush Life” by Zara Larsson. The next one is an influencer promoting a startup mattress brand, set to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” After that, it’s Kylie Jenner lip-syncing to “Pretty Little Baby” by Connie Francis. Then it’s your favorite NCAA team, using AC/DC’s “Back in Black” in a hype video.

The creators of each of those videos pulled their music from TikTok or Instagram’s vast song libraries, which make it easy for modern social media users to add fully-licensed tracks to their posts. But only some of them were actually allowed to do so.

Here’s why: According to the rules of those platforms, the song libraries are strictly for personal use. Videos posted by businesses or paid influencers, on the other hand, must utilize a far more limited commercial library. If a brand wants to use a popular song that’s not there, they must get a sync license — just like any conventional advertisement on TV.

Many companies have apparently missed that message. For years, large commercial accounts have liberally used well-known songs on social media to promote their brands — so much so that some social media managers likely don’t even know they aren’t allowed to.

But over the past two years, record labels and their lawyers have launched a large-scale crackdown on music used in social posts without permission. They’ve filed lawsuits against Marriott, Chili’s and more than a dozen NBA teams, claiming they’ve used thousands of songs. And many more companies have settled privately, experts say.

“For every case that we’re seeing, there are a ton of cases that we’re not seeing,” says Sarah Moses, a partner at the law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips LLP, who has closely tracked the issue. “What you’re seeing bubble up in the courts is really just the tip of a very large iceberg.”

The battle has its origins in 2021, when the three major labels began suing drink maker Bang Energy over its use of music in promotional videos; UMG claimed the company had used songs by Justin Bieber, Dua Lipa, Cardi B and others in more than 100 TikToks. The labels eventually won their cases, as judges rejected Bang’s excuse that it believed such songs were fair game because they’d been provided by the platforms.

In 2024, music companies really started cracking down. Sony Music filed a case against Marriott, then Kobalt sued the New York Knicks and 13 other NBA teams. Months later, UMG sued Chili’s for using songs by Ariana Grande, Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga, Snoop Dogg and many others. It continued in 2025, as Warner Music sued Crumbl Cookies over its viral marketing content and Sony sued the University of Southern California over music used by the college football powerhouse.

The cases are unlikely to stop coming anytime soon, as the problem appears to be widespread. Third Chair, a startup that sells AI-powered monitoring and enforcement services, says it uncovered more 2.4 million commercial posts containing music posted between 2019 and 2025. Those numbers are imprecise — some could have been legally licensed — but they hardly indicate an isolated problem.

“We’re finding that there’s way more of this than anyone actually thinks. Way more,” says Yoav Zimmerman, Third Chair’s co-founder and CEO. “People think: ‘Oh, one company messes up every once and a while.’ [But] there are tens of thousands of companies that are doing this.”

How did it get that way? After all, these aren’t anonymous bad actors torrenting music, or mom-and-pop companies grabbing a random song without permission for a Facebook post. These are major corporations with huge legal departments, accused of using copyrighted music on a mass scale.

In its lawsuit against Marriott, for instance, Sony claimed that the company — the world’s largest hotel chain, with $26 billion in revenue last year — illegally used popular songs in more than 900 social media posts over a four-year span, including tracks by Beyoncé, Harry Styles, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and Miley Cyrus. That case ended in a settlement five months later.

“I think there’s been a mindset that social media is like the Wild West, where anything goes,” says Moses, the Manatt lawyer. “Even at large, sophisticated companies, the social group is often run by individuals who are younger, who have seen everyone using music and think: ‘If they can do it, why can’t we?’”

Some companies facing these lawsuits have essentially made a version of that argument in court. Hit with threats of litigation from Sony, footwear retailer DSW went on the offensive, filing a preemptive lawsuit that argued it had, in fact, been allowed to use the label’s music in its posts. DSW claimed Sony had “encouraged and supported” brands to use the songs by making them available on Instagram and TikTok, but was now trying to “pull the rug out” after already being paid licensing fees.

“[DSW] will not permit the labels to bully them, abuse copyright law, and cast a shadow over their businesses,” the retailer wrote, calling Sony’s legal threats “opportunistic attempts to extract still more money for copyrights on which they have already received full compensation.”

That argument could face an uphill climb in court, though. The terms of use for both Instagram and TikTok are fairly clear: The former bars the use of music for “commercial or non-personal purposes” without “appropriate licenses,” while the latter says songs can be used “only for personal entertainment and non-commercial purposes.”

Faced with that explicit language, many large companies are now implementing training and workflows to fix the problem, Moses says, aimed at bridging the “disconnect between the marketing department and the legal department.” Other companies will likely start to litigate more aggressively rather than pay increasingly large settlement demands, especially as their insurers tire of paying such fees.

In court, some of those companies might argue that their use of the music was essentially accidental and thus doesn’t entitle labels and publishers to the kind of maximum statutory damages foisted against willful pirates, a cut-your-losses strategy that will likely be more persuasive to a judge than simply claiming they did nothing wrong at all.

As the fight goes on, a trickier question will be what happens with the millions of TikTok and Instagram influencers who operate personal accounts but are frequently paid to hawk specific products. Such accounts have long been a gray area when it comes to advertising law, and experts say they’ll pose similarly difficult problems when it comes to the debate over music licensing.

Does a mommy blogger with 750,000 Instagram followers need to go negotiate a sync license every time she posts a video of her kids to a popular song? Probably not. But what about when she posts a hashtag #ad with a @partner? In the strictest legal sense, the answer is almost certainly yes.

Going after influencers would be easier said than done, however. It’s one thing to sue a global hotel chain over hundreds of obvious commercial posts — that’s easy. But are record labels really going to go full 2000s file-sharing era and start suing individuals for copyright infringement over specific paid posts?

“The rightsholders are able to go after the big companies in a pretty clean and clear way, because these are obviously commercial accounts. But influencers become very complicated to navigate,” Moses said. “We haven’t seen it yet, partly because there may just not be as much money there. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the tail end of this process.”