Your Brand’s TikTok Song Could Cost Millions

**Tim Elliott** (0:00)
It's the Morning Drive, this is Mira Business FM, and brands across the Middle East are being warned over unlicensed music use in either advertisements or social media campaigns. Lots of local artists as well are missing out on royalties altogether. Lots to talk about, so it needs to be unpacked. And we have the man to do that, Pierre Carnet, Managing Director at MassiveMusic MENA, is in the studio with me. It's good to see you.

**Pierre Carnet** (0:27)
Good to see you too.

**Tim Elliott** (0:29)
Thank you for flying in from South Africa, and you're flying out tonight.
I said to you, Pierre, do you need to sleep? You know, I'm fine. And you just missed the airlines at the moment.

**Pierre Carnet** (0:42)
Always ready to talk about music, so it's all good.

**Tim Elliott** (0:44)
Do you know what? There is a huge misconception, lots of things to kind of clear up this morning. I'd like to do this with you. A misconception amongst, I guess, marketing teams that if a song is in a social media apps library, it's free for a business to use. So I want to clear the air. What's the actual difference between personal use and commercial licensing?
And how are UAE brands getting caught out?

**Pierre Carnet** (1:12)
Yeah, sure. It's quite a topic to unpack.
I think you've summarized it quite clearly in just a couple of words already there. Which is, when you're using music in online content, generally, if you're just a regular person using it for your social media stories or background of a post, generally, as long as you're using music that's been pre-cleared as part of that platform's library, you're fine to do so because that's the purpose of having that pre-clearance is for personal use. However, as soon as you're either a corporate brand or even an individual influencer who's selling a product, and by doing so, you're technically a business if you're an influencer that's selling services online, then things fall into a different category, which is that now you're using this music for commercial purposes. You're selling product or service behind it, and therefore, you're leveraging that music, leveraging the intellectual property of that composition for profit, for gain.
Then it falls into an advertising space, into a commercial use space. And that actually means that you need to go and clear the rights of that piece of music. You need to go license that piece of music from the people who own the rights to it, essentially paying them some money to get their permission to use the music to advertise your service or your product. And if you don't do that, then they will have grounds to either ask you to at the very least take down the content, if not actually take you to court for use of intellectual property without permission.

**Tim Elliott** (2:52)
Okay, so we're seeing lots of regional campaigns being silenced or flagged by AI-driven copyright bots. That's a real thing now.
Beyond just losing a video, what kinds of financial, I don't know, reputational penalties are there? If, that a brand might face, if say a major label decided to pursue an infringement claim?

**Pierre Carnet** (3:20)
Yeah, absolutely.
So the thing is, I think this, to answer this, we need to sort of have a bit of an understanding of the value of music and of intellectual property, which I think is something that's really quite misunderstood as a whole by the general population, wherever you go. Where people assume that if something exists, whether it's a piece of music or a picture or a clip from a video, and you can find it online, you can probably use it and reuse it yourself as you like. But generally, someone owns the rights to that original piece of content, whatever it may be, and that person has the exclusive and discretionary ability to decide where and by whom it's going to be used.
When we look at music, typically, very famous songs, the ones that everyone would recognize, we've seen them often in movies, we've seen them often in ads. Everyone wants to use those songs, right? Because a great way to connect with your audience or to make people pay attention to you, is to leverage things that they're already familiar with. As a result, the people who own the rights to very, very famous global hit songs, generally will be very careful with who they give the permission to use that piece of music, to not water down the value of that piece of music, and they will charge quite a bit of money for you to be able to use that music commercially. So if you're a brand and you want to use a global hit song in an ad, it might cost you somewhere in the 400,000 dirhams and above to use it even in a social media campaign. However, if you don't go and make that deal and clear the rights to that music, you will most likely, as soon as it's been propagated and maybe appeared on television or in cinemas, you might get a lawsuit that is worth double, triple, four times that. We've seen lawsuits that go into the multi-million US dollars with some global brands that have been infringing on music. So at the end of the day, is the risk really worth it compared to what might catch up with you in the future? I'm not too sure. Plus, if you're releasing content with unlicensed music that you've also paid to produce, to film, to get actors into, to have a nice director manage for you, that's all thrown out of the window because now you can't use that film with that piece of music you didn't pay for.