SOUND LICENSING: The hidden cost of the needle-drop
©Adi Goldstein
A fitness apparel brand used a major label's catalogue across its social channels and ended up facing a lawsuit from Sony Music seeking $44 million. A cookie brand was sued by Warner Music Group over roughly 159 songs used in short-form content. A university athletics program was targeted by Sony for allegedly using more than 170 tracks across 283 clips. None of these were luxury houses, but every marketing team in the industry should read the pattern carefully, because the mechanism that created the exposure is identical to what most campaigns still do every day, often without anyone on the team clocking the risk.
The trend line is not stopping
Trending audio feels free because it is everywhere, but as Reed Smith's legal analysis of the trend explains, a sound licensed for personal use on a platform is not automatically cleared for commercial use, and the gap between those two things has become one of the most active areas of music litigation of the past two years. Track Club's rundown of the recent lawsuits makes the exposure concrete: for a fashion house running campaigns across dozens of markets, each with different rights holders and territorial rules, a single popular needle-drop can carry legal risk that dwarfs the cost of the campaign it was meant to elevate, and the exposure extends to content posted by influencers, partners, and ambassadors, not just the brand's own official channels, which makes the risk far harder to fully contain even with a strict internal policy.
There is a reputational layer here too, separate from the legal one. A track associated with a lawsuit, a controversy, or simply another brand's campaign a season earlier can retroactively attach unwanted context to a luxury house's own content, an association no amount of careful creative direction can fully undo once it has been made publicly, in a headline, by a plaintiff's lawyer rather than the brand itself.
A trending song is rented attention with an invoice that can arrive years later.
The case for building instead of borrowing
Reed Smith's own recommendations to brands navigating this risk name commissioned music explicitly as a mitigation strategy: not the cheapest option upfront, but one of the only ones that removes infringement risk entirely, because no claim is possible on a composition a brand owns outright. Unlike a licensed track, it can also be reused indefinitely, across any market, without renegotiation or expiry, a genuine long-term cost advantage once amortized across even a handful of campaigns. The legal argument and the brand argument point in exactly the same direction. A composed piece, built specifically for a campaign, is not just safer. It is also the only version of "the song from that campaign" that will ever be associated with the brand that commissioned it, never diluted by whatever else that same trending sound gets used for elsewhere, by a competitor, a stranger, or a lawsuit nobody saw coming.
