Now Trending: Unlicensed Commercial Use of Music in Short-Form Content
- 5 min read
BCGuardian, LLC
Content Protection
Music on social media is ubiquitous. It fuels trends, drives engagement, and enables users to connect more deeply with short-form content. For individual users performing the latest dance challenge or uploading cat videos, the ability to tap into an expansive library of music is a seamless part of the experience.
However, brands eager to join the trend frequently use the same music to promote their latest products or services. This commercial use can cause material harm to rights owners, and puts brands at risk for legal exposure when proper licensing is not obtained.
Unlicensed commercial use of music in short-form marketing is an emerging threat to music rights owners. Not only does it lead to lost licensing revenue and loss of control over brands’ usage of their content, but the current model established by platforms imposes the role of policing for such conduct on rights owners.
In this post, we explore some of the root sources of this challenge, the role social media platforms play as enablers, and the position in which rights owners are left.
The Seeds of an Emerging Challenge
Modern marketing strategies encourage brands to be authentic and “join the conversation” around the prevailing zeitgeist. On social media platforms, this frequently centers around trending audio which includes rights owners’ protected music. These conversations, however, are fleeting, leading to a mismatch of speed. Social media trends come and go in a matter of days or weeks, while the traditional path for licensing can be much slower.
While brands are ultimately accountable for ensuring proper licensing, a contributing factor that cannot be ignored is brands’ miscomprehension of acceptable use. When record labels or publishers agree to make their music available within an application’s sounds library, the license is almost always intended for personal, non-commercial use.
Together, these factors contribute to the friction between rights owners and brands in the creation of commercial short-form content. At its worst, the model deployed by brands could be viewed as “ask forgiveness later”. At its best, a brand may be ignorant (though no less culpable for copyright infringement) as to the unlawful nature of their commercial use of content from a platform’s sound kit.
A Frictionless Path to Infringement
Limited guardrails imposed by social media platforms are also contributing to the emergence of unauthorized commercial use in short-form content. Three prominent loopholes enable brands to access and improperly use popular music.
- Platforms rely on an “honor system” for brands to self-select into the appropriate account type upon account creation. A user creating an account on behalf of a commercial entity may, on most platforms, sign up for a creator account, which is designed for end users and typically includes access to the sound kit for non-commercial personal uses.
- Platforms allow brands to create original sounds with limited vetting of the musical content included within such “original” sounds. This includes uploading audio content which includes music rights owners’ protected content with minor alterations.
- Platforms enable commercial accounts to save sounds from other users to their own libraries, offering a roundabout way for brands to access and quickly integrate protected content into their short-form marketing.
Collectively, these loopholes create an environment in which brands have technical access to non-commercial sounds or full sound kits, even if they lack the legal right to use them.
The Rights Owner’s Dilemma
It is unsurprising that this environment is rife with unauthorized use. Brands follow viral marketing strategies across platforms which place the musical content at the center of those viral waves only a few clicks away.
What is more difficult to fathom is that the impacted rights owner bears the burden of policing for such unauthorized commercial use. And with billions of videos uploaded to major platforms daily, the challenge is searching for the metaphorical needle in an ever-expanding haystack. Compounding the challenge imposed by sheer scale are the limitation of automated tools to detect altered content and the human analysis frequently required to determine what constitutes commercial use.
Taken together, these challenges can pose a considerable financial and operational drain on rights owners, who must deploy technical monitoring and employ teams to sift through potential infringements.
Confronting the Challenge
When posed with the early stages of unlicensed commercial use in short-form content nearly three years ago, BCGuardian developed a dedicated approach blending leading technology and expert hands-on analysis. Our hybrid model provided rights owners with deep insights and actionable intelligence surrounding the use of their content.
Emerging from our early hybrid approach, we created Reverb – an end-to-end solution which operates at the scale rights owners require to confront these challenges head-on. Today, Reverb deploys a persistent approach to monitoring all leading platforms, agentic AI workflows, and good old fashioned human-led analytical rigor.
To learn more about Reverb or how we may be able to support your organization, drop us a note – we’d love to hear from you.