Viral Music Lawsuits: Why Brands Keep Getting Sued

Record labels and music publishers have been suing brands for using popular music on social media since 2021, and the pace has only picked up. The business logic is simple on the labels’ side: the music libraries built into TikTok, Instagram, and similar platforms are licensed for personal, non-commercial use only, so a company that drops a Dua Lipa clip into a promotional post is using the song without a license it was supposed to buy. Statutory damages under U.S. copyright law can reach $150,000 per song, and brands with hundreds of posts face theoretical exposure in the tens of millions.

The Licensing Gap Behind Every Case

Social platforms negotiate blanket deals with labels and publishers, but those deals are written for individual users making personal content. TikTok’s terms, for example, state that sounds are provided “so long as the videos are only for personal entertainment and non-commercial purposes.”¹ Instagram and YouTube carry similar restrictions, and both TikTok and Instagram maintain separate “Commercial Music Libraries” of pre-cleared tracks for business accounts.²

A brand that wants to use a mainstream song in a promotional post actually needs two separate licenses. A synchronization license from the music publisher covers pairing the composition with visuals. A master use license from the record label covers the specific recording.¹ Together, those licenses can run from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per song.² Many brands either don’t know or decide the odds of being caught are low.

The 2022 Bang Energy ruling closed off the main defense. UMG sued Vital Pharmaceuticals, Bang’s maker, over roughly 140 TikTok ads, and Bang argued that TikTok’s user license covered its commercial use. U.S. District Judge William P. Dimitrouleas disagreed and granted partial summary judgment for UMG, holding that the platform license does not extend to commercial advertisements.³ A parallel ruling followed in favor of Sony Music.⁴ Every suit filed since has leaned on that precedent.

How Labels Find the Posts

The odds of getting caught have shifted. Copyright owners now use AI-powered audio fingerprinting and web-scraping tools to spot unauthorized use in both new posts and years-old archives.⁵⁶⁷ The practical result: a short clip buried on a brand’s feed from three years ago can still surface as the basis for a complaint.

Why the Damage Numbers Are So Large

The headline figures in these cases come straight from the structure of 17 U.S.C. § 504. A copyright owner can skip proving actual losses and elect statutory damages instead. The standard range is $750 to $30,000 per work. If the court finds the infringement was willful, the ceiling climbs to $150,000 per work.⁸

Labels routinely plead willfulness, pointing to cease-and-desist letters the brand ignored or to the pop-up warnings on the platforms themselves that ask users to confirm they have the rights to the content they upload.⁹ Because the damages run per work, totals scale fast. Sony’s complaint against Gymshark covered 297 counts and sought up to $44 million. Sony’s complaint against Marriott described “rampant” infringement across more than 900 posts and cited roughly $140 million in exposure.¹ No brand has publicly paid anything near those ceilings, but the ceilings are what bring brands to the settlement table.

Which Brands Have Been Hit

The defendants span industries. Fitness apparel (Gymshark). Hospitality (Marriott). Pro sports (14 NBA teams, sued by Kobalt Music Publishing in July 2024 for compositions used without sync licenses).¹⁰ Casual dining (Chili’s parent Brinker International, sued by both the Beastie Boys and UMG in 2024). Cosmetics (OFRA, sued by Sony in 2023 over more than 300 posts).¹¹ Footwear retail (DSW, sued by both Warner and Sony in 2025). Cookies (Crumbl, sued by Warner in April 2025 over 159 songs).¹² A university athletic department (USC, sued by Sony over 170-plus songs across 250-plus videos, with statutory damages up to $42 million).¹³ Teen fashion (PacSun, sued by Warner affiliates in December 2025 over at least 290 works by artists including Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, Lizzo, Cardi B, and Ariana Grande).¹⁴ Online fashion (Quince, sued in April 2026 by UMG and Concord over 67 recordings and 71 compositions in posts by its roughly 300 monthly influencer partners).¹⁵

The pattern across these cases is remarkably consistent. The complaint lands. The brand negotiates for a few months. The parties settle on confidential terms. Gymshark settled with Sony in January 2022, with the suit dismissed with prejudice and each side bearing its own costs.¹⁶ Marriott settled in October 2024. The Chili’s cases settled through mediation in May 2025.¹⁷ USC reached a settlement in principle in March 2026, Crumbl in May 2026. None of the financial terms have been disclosed.

The Defenses That Have Been Tried

Brands have raised fair use, statute of limitations, “copyright misuse” (arguing labels are seeking disproportionate payments), and DMCA preemption. The NBA teams, represented by Barnes & Thornburg, raised the full set, including a fair use argument that the clips served purposes like news reporting or parody.¹⁰ Legal commentators flagged fair use as an uphill fight in the OFRA case given the purely commercial nature of the posts.¹¹

The most aggressive pushback has come from DSW’s parent, Designer Brands, which filed its own suit in the Southern District of Ohio in July 2025 seeking a declaratory judgment of non-infringement.¹⁸ DSW argues the DMCA already provides compensation mechanisms rights holders could use, that labels and platforms create the problem by making music easy to overlay while hiding the license limits, and that labels are choosing litigation over available statutory remedies.⁹ The Ohio case remains active, with mediation ordered. It is the clearest live test of whether any of these defenses can gain traction.

The Influencer Problem

A brand’s exposure doesn’t stop at its own account. Labels have pursued “secondary liability” theories, arguing a brand benefited from, contributed to, or failed to police the music choices of its paid influencers.⁹ Both Gymshark and Quince involved influencer-created content. The Quince complaint specifically alleges the brand controls its roughly 300 monthly partners closely enough to be responsible for their soundtracks.¹⁵

The risk sharpens the moment a brand reposts, boosts, or runs paid ads built on influencer content. Amplifying that content through paid promotion creates direct exposure, regardless of whether the influencer did the uploading.¹⁹

What Legal Use Actually Looks Like

The lawful options for a brand are narrower than many marketing teams realize.

Sync and master use licenses negotiated directly with the publisher and label. The most expensive route and the only one that unlocks a specific hit song.
The platform’s own commercial library. TikTok’s Commercial Music Library and Instagram’s equivalent offer pre-cleared tracks for business accounts, but the catalog is far smaller than the consumer library and the license is usually tied to that one platform.¹⁹
Royalty-free music services, which clear the copyright risk at the cost of giving up recognizable songs.⁵
Original or commissioned music, which gives the brand full ownership and no licensing exposure.²

A few assumptions get brands into trouble over and over. Using only a few seconds of a song is not a safe harbor; audio fingerprinting catches fragments. Crediting the artist in the caption carries no legal weight. Buying the song on Spotify or Apple Music grants a personal listening license, not a right to use the track in video content.²

Why This Keeps Happening

Settlements leave the law unchanged. Each resolved case keeps the Bang Energy holding standing without producing a new ruling that might cut the other way, and each confidential settlement makes it harder for the next brand to gauge what a reasonable exit price looks like. The threat of statutory damages gives labels the leverage; the lack of a clear appellate win for any defendant keeps brands from pushing cases to trial. Until a court tests one of the defenses on the merits, the suits will keep arriving, and the catalog of defendants will keep growing across industries that share one habit: putting a hit song behind a product shot and posting it.

1
Reed Smith. Viral and Deadly: When Music Goes Bad on Social
2
Bensound Blog. How to Legally Use Music on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube
3
Lowelaw.com. Bang Energy Liable for Infringing Music on TikTok
4
Bloomberg Law. TikTok Music Lawsuits Fire Warning Shots to Brands, Influencers
5
Soundstripe. Why Your Brand Can’t Use Mainstream Music on Social Media
6
Billboard. Music Use on Social Media: Why Record Labels Sue
7
Musically. Third Chair Aims to Help Music Firms Monetise Unauthorised Ads
8
Cornell Law Institute. 17 U.S. Code § 504 – Remedies for Infringement
9
Wilson Elser. Copyright Infringement Litigations Based on Influencer Posts
10
Sportico. NBA Teams Defense in Copyright Music Lawsuits
11
Womble Bond Dickinson. Brands and Influencers Beware: Popular Songs on Social Media at Heart of Copyright Infringement
12
Billboard. Warner Music Lawsuit Against Crumbl Cookie Over Social Posts
13
Daily Trojan. Sony Music Reaches Settlement With USC Lawsuit
14
Music Business Worldwide. US Fashion Retailer PacSun Sued by WMG
15
Musically. UMG and Concord Sue Fashion Startup Quince for Music in Socials
16
Bloomberg Law. Sony Music, Gymshark Agree to Settlement Over TikTok Videos
17
AXS TV. UMG, Beastie Boys Settle Lawsuit Against Chili’s
18
CourtListener. Designer Brands Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment
19
Third Chair. TikTok Commercial Library vs. Custom Music Licenses