Spaces In Between Productions

From Bang Energy to Crumbl Cookies, a wave of copyright lawsuits is sending a clear message to every brand with a social media presence. The question isn't whether this affects you. It's whether you find out before or after the cease-and-desist.

I want to tell you a story about cookies.

Not because cookies are interesting though Crumbl's are, genuinely, very good but because what just happened to one of the most viral brand presences on social media is the clearest possible illustration of a reckoning that has been building across the music industry for four years.

In April 2025, Warner Music Group filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Crumbl Cookies in Utah federal court. The claim: Crumbl used at least 159 copyrighted songs Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, BTS, Coldplay in TikTok and Instagram promotional videos. Without a license. The potential damages: nearly $24 million.

But Crumbl isn't a cautionary tale about a brand that didn't know better. They received a cease-and-desist in August 2023. They kept posting. Warner found six new infringing videos after the letter went out. In January 2024, Crumbl posted a TikTok that appeared to acknowledge the issue and still didn't remove the existing audio.

And Crumbl is not alone. Not even close.

The Scorecard Nobody Wants to Be On

Let me give you the full picture, because this is not a Crumbl problem. This is an industry-wide reckoning that has been quietly building since 2021 and is now accelerating fast.

Read that table again. Bang Energy. Marriott Hotels. Chili's sued twice in three months by two different plaintiffs. NBA teams. Gymshark. And now Crumbl.

These are not small businesses that stumbled into a legal gray area. These are companies with legal teams, marketing departments, and documented histories of being warned. The pattern across every case is identical: the brand was told, the brand continued, the lawsuit followed.

The Misconception at the Center of All of It

Here's what I hear constantly when I talk to brand managers, marketing directors, and agency creatives about music licensing:

"But it's on TikTok. Anyone can use it."

This is the misconception that has cost these brands millions of dollars in legal exposure. And I understand why it exists because TikTok and Instagram have made it genuinely, seamlessly easy to add any trending song to any video. The interface doesn't distinguish between a teenager posting a dance video and a brand with $4 billion in annual revenue promoting a product.

But the law does.

TikTok and Instagram have licensing agreements with music labels that cover personal, non-commercial use. The moment your brand account uses that same song to promote a product even organically, even without paid media spend, even if it looks exactly like user-generated content you have crossed into commercial territory. You need a sync license. You need both the master recording and the publishing rights cleared. And if you're working with influencers who are posting brand content, you may be liable for what they use too.

Marriott's case is particularly instructive here. Sony Music first notified them in 2020 five years before the lawsuit that their hotel social media accounts were using unlicensed recordings. The warnings continued for years. In May 2024 alone, Sony identified 47 new instances of infringement. The final lawsuit named 931 songs. 931.

At some point, this stops being an oversight and starts being a choice.

Why Now? Why Is This Happening All at Once?

This is the question I find most interesting, because the legal framework hasn't changed. Copyright law isn't new. What changed is the music industry's willingness and capacity to enforce it at scale.

A few things converged:

• The rise of TikTok created an enormous volume of commercially motivated content built entirely on copyrighted audio. Brands were essentially getting free soundtrack services courtesy of the major labels' rosters.
• Streaming gutted traditional music revenue. Sync licensing placing music in film, TV, advertising, and branded content became one of the few remaining high-value revenue streams for rights holders. Labels and publishers got very serious about protecting it.
• Technology made enforcement possible at scale. Rights holders can now track audio usage across platforms systematically. That blueberry cheesecake cookie video set to "Blueberry Faygo" wasn't discovered by a lawyer scrolling TikTok. It was found by software.
• The Bang Energy lawsuit in 2021 established that this was viable and winnable. Once the first major case succeeded, the floodgates opened.

The music industry spent years absorbing the losses of the streaming transition. They are not absorbing this one.

What I Actually Think About All of This

I run a sync licensing company. I'm supposed to tell you this is terrible and you should be very afraid. And in terms of legal exposure yes, genuinely, the risk is real and the enforcement trend is only going one direction.

But my honest take is more complicated than that.

Most of the brands caught up in these lawsuits didn't set out to steal from artists. They set out to make content that connected with their audience. TikTok culture is built on shared audio the meme, the trend, the song everyone recognizes. There's a genuine creative logic to using the same song as the cultural moment your brand is trying to ride.

The problem is that logic has never included paying the people who made the song.

That's the part I can't let slide. Not as a legal matter as a values matter.

Music is not infrastructure. It's not a free utility that exists to serve your marketing brief. Every track in every viral campaign was made by a human being who spent time, money, and creative energy getting it right. The TikTok music licensing system where brands essentially free-rode on artists' work while the platform profited was always extractive. The lawsuits are just the correction.

I'm not sad about the correction. I'm frustrated that it took this long, and that the correction comes through litigation instead of through brands deciding on their own that artists deserve to be paid.

The Influencer Problem Nobody Is Talking About Enough

Every major lawsuit in this wave has included influencer partnerships in the claim. This is the detail that I think is most underappreciated by brands building content strategies right now.

When you hire an influencer pay them, give them product, promise future paid work, run their content as a paid ad their content becomes your commercial content under copyright law. If they use a trending song in a video promoting your product, your brand can be held liable. You cannot outsource the copyright risk to the creator.

So What Do You Actually Do?

I'm going to be direct here, because I think the "music licensing is complicated" framing has become an excuse for inaction. It's not that complicated. Here's what it actually looks like:

For brands at any stage:

• Stop using platform music libraries for commercial content. Instagram and TikTok's libraries are for personal use. Your brand account is not a personal account.
• Get pre-cleared music. There are sync libraries specifically built for commercial use where every track is already licensed for brand content. This is not expensive relative to the legal risk.
• Brief your influencers. Every creator brief should include explicit language about music use. If they post branded content, they use cleared audio. Period.
• Have one conversation with a music licensing professional. Not a lawyer someone who works in sync licensing who can tell you what you actually need for your content volume and budget. Most brands have never had this conversation.

For brands already in trouble:

• Audit your existing content. If you have posts with commercial music, take them down or replace the audio now. Do not wait for a cease-and-desist to act.
• Do not ignore a cease-and-desist. Crumbl's decision to keep posting after receiving the letter is what turned a manageable situation into a $24 million lawsuit.

What This Means for the Music Industry

I want to end with this, because it matters more to me than the legal risk analysis.

The enforcement wave is not going to create a golden age for independent artists. The money from these lawsuits goes to major labels Warner, Universal, Sony not to the composers and musicians who actually made the songs. The Beyoncés and Taylor Swifts of the world are not hurting for sync revenue.

What the reckoning does is establish the principle that music has commercial value that must be compensated. That principle, if it holds, creates the conditions for a more ethical music economy one where brands pay for what they use, where that payment flows to the people who created the work, and where independent artists can access the same infrastructure that the majors have always used.

That's what I'm building with the Spaces In Between Productions Sync Library. Not a compliance service. A marketplace that makes it as easy to license ethical, locally produced music from independent artists as it is to add a trending song to a TikTok with the difference that the artists actually get paid.

The reckoning created the opening. The question is what we build in it.