Gymshark. Marriott. Crumbl. Three well-known brands, all involved in major music copyright cases since 2021.

Knowing the rules is not the same as being able to follow them at the speed and scale content now moves. When a track is trending today and the post needs to go out today, the traditional licensing route struggles to keep up.

A sync deal is built for campaigns planned weeks ahead, and for those it works well. For daily social posts, finding the rightsholder and agreeing terms can take longer than the trend lasts.

The three major cases

Gymshark, 2021. The UK fitness brand was sued in the US over 297 recordings used in social videos across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. The complaint alleged that many of the videos were made by influencers, who posted them on their own accounts and also provided them for Gymshark to repost. At the legal maximum, the damages at stake came to around $44 million. The two sides settled in January 2022 and no terms were made public.

Marriott, 2024. The hotel group faced a claim covering 931 uses of music in social media posts. According to the complaint, 913 of them were on the social accounts of hotels Marriott owns, manages or franchises, and 18 came from paid influencers. At the legal maximum, potential damages were around $140 million. Both sides asked the court to close the case in October 2024 and no terms were made public.

Crumbl, 2025. The cookie brand was sued over at least 159 recordings and songs used in TikTok and Instagram videos, with damages sought of up to around $24 million. The complaint said the videos were made by Crumbl and its social media influencers. The two sides agreed a settlement in May 2026, and it was completed in June.

Those damages figures are ceilings, not outcomes. US law allows up to $150,000 per work for wilful infringement. For most brands, the real cost is the time, legal fees and disruption of dealing with the claims.

All three cases were about short form social content using popular songs. Each was built from hundreds of individual posts.

The people posting don't always know the rules

Big brands may know the rules. Plenty of the people posting for them might not. The single biggest flaw in music licensing right now is knowledge.

I once spoke to one of the world's biggest sports teams. Their high-production videos used royalty-free music and went through legal. Their everyday posts didn't. A junior member of the social team would pick whatever track was trending and post it, with no one checking. Their legal department had no idea.

That split is common. Anything that looks like an advert gets signed off. The daily posts that keep an account alive don't, because nobody thinks of them as advertising.

The big lawsuits are built the same way. A claim listing hundreds of songs sounds like one huge mistake. In reality it's hundreds of small ones, made by different people over months or years. Marriott's case shows it most clearly. Almost every post in the claim came from an individual hotel's account, including franchised hotels, yet the claim landed on the group. Often nobody on the team that gets the legal notice made any of the posts.

A lot of it comes down to what people assume. You hear it all the time: "it's only 15 seconds, it'll be fine." It isn't. Once a track is used to promote something, it needs a licence, however short the clip.

Everybody knows how to buy a car park ticket. There are signs, machines and someone to ask. Nobody has ever laid music licensing out that clearly, so most people only learn the rules from someone who's already been caught. Everyone else does what's easiest. They use the track anyway, or switch to royalty-free music so at least they know where they stand.

What counts as commercial use

A simple rule of thumb: if a post exists to promote a brand, product or service, it's commercial. That includes:

• Posts on a brand or business account
• Content that promotes a product, even in a casual way
• Creator and influencer posts the brand paid for or sent free product for
• Organic clips that later get boosted or reused as ads

This is where a lot of the confusion starts. The trending tracks found on social apps are generally cleared for personal use, not for brands. Business accounts are usually pointed to separate libraries built for commercial use, such as TikTok's Commercial Music Library and Meta's Sound Collection. They are a safe option, but each one only covers its own platform and they rarely include the tracks everyone is using that week.

Where the gap usually sits

For most brands, the risk isn't in the big campaign. It sits in four places:

• Daily posts. Fast, frequent and often made by whoever is running the account that week.
• Creator partnerships. Briefs usually cover the message and the product, not the music.
• Reused clips. A post that started as organic content becomes a paid ad and the music follows it.
• Older posts. Content from a year or two ago stays live long after anyone remembers what track it used.

A quick check you can run this week

This doesn't need a big audit. Five steps will show you where the gaps are:

1. Look at the last 30 days of posts from your brand accounts and from any creators you paid.
2. Note any track that didn't come from a commercial music library, like TikTok's Commercial Music Library or Meta's Sound Collection, or from a written licence. Check "original audio" too, as it often contains commercial tracks.
3. Check your creator contracts say who is responsible for the music, so it's clear between you and the creator if a claim ever comes in.
4. Check which posts were boosted, run as ads or reposted from a creator's account. Each one counts as a new use by the brand.
5. Pick one person to own music decisions, set one simple rule for the team, and decide what happens to anything you find: license it or take it down.

If you find problems, go back further. Older posts are still live, and claims can cover years.

Run this way, the check finds gaps in the process, not mistakes by people. That makes them easy to fix, and your team can keep making content with confidence.

What good looks like

Brands want to use the music people love. Artists and rightsholders want their music used. The rules already support both sides.

What's missing is a workflow that makes the licensed choice the easy one. Good licensing should meet people at the moment they need it at the point they pick the track, on terms the rightsholder has already set. It should tell people how, when and with whom they need to license something. It shouldn't assume they already know.

Cases like these rarely start with someone setting out to break the rules. They start when the easy route and the licensed route aren’t quick and easy.