I hear constantly right now: Budgets are tight. Every department is being asked to justify every line item. And when the conversation turns to music, the answer I get from communications directors, university media teams, and city agencies is almost always some version of the same thing. 

We already have music covered. 

“Covered” sometimes means an old licensing relationship nobody’s revisited in years. Sometimes it’s AI-generated tracks, Creative Commons, or a royalty-free library. Sometimes it’s whatever’s available in the platform’s own audio library, used the same way a student would use it on a personal account. I’ve even heard the workaround stated outright: We create the content from our free personal accounts, then upload it to our official channel. None of it costs anything extra, so none of it registers as a budget conversation at all. 

The problem is that “covered” and “compliant” aren’t the same word. Every one of those sources carries its own version of the exposure this article is about, and the personal account workaround in particular doesn’t hold up, a point worth its own article. Institutions using any of these usually don’t find out they’re exposed until someone else points it out for them. 

What “We Can’t Afford It” Actually Leads To

A license fee is a number you can plan for. It’s predictable. You know what it costs before you spend it, and once it’s paid, the exposure is closed. 

Getting music wrong doesn’t work that way. When an institution uses unlicensed commercial music and a rights holder identifies it, the cost isn’t a single number. It’s a sequence. Legal review. Staff time pulled away from their actual jobs to respond to notices, produce documentation, and sit through depositions if it goes that far. Outside counsel, if your general counsel’s office doesn’t handle IP litigation in-house, which most don’t. And all of that happens before anyone even discusses a settlement figure. 

Federal copyright litigation regularly runs into six and seven-figures before a case ever reaches a settlement, and that reality is exactly why settlements happen as often as they do. It’s not always that the defendant’s legal position was weak. It’s that proving you were right costs more than admitting you weren’t. That’s a hard thing for a public institution to explain to a board, a city council, or taxpayers: that you spent more defending a position than the underlying dispute was worth. 

USC’s case with Sony Music shows what the actual timeline looks like. Sony’s notices to USC about unlicensed use of its catalog date back to 2021. The two sides didn’t enter settlement discussions until August 2024, and the case itself wasn’t filed until March 2025, over more than 280 social media posts across USC’s athletics accounts. It wasn’t until late March 2026 that the two sides finally settled, with terms that were never made public. That’s not a dispute resolved in a budget cycle. That’s five years from first notice to resolution. Sony had sought statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the 170-plus songs at issue, putting the potential exposure at $42 million. USC never contested that the infringement happened. The facts were never in dispute. USC didn’t win this case. They settled it. 

And this isn’t slowing down. In April 2026, Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group sued Quince, a direct-to-consumer brand valued at over ten billion dollars, over what their complaint calls rampant and brazen infringement in TikTok posts. The plaintiffs point to Quince’s own job listings, roles like Creative Strategy Director and Brand Partnership and Influence Outreach, to argue the company exercised real creative control over the influencer content in question, not arm's-length sponsorship. That’s the same theory that closed the influencer workaround in the Marriott and DSW cases. It’s still working, it’s still being filed, and the company on the receiving end this time had every resource in the world to know better. 

Here's what’s worth noticing. I went and scrolled through Quince’s TikTok, both what they’ve posted since the lawsuit and what came before it. Not one commercial track anywhere, recent or older, on a brand that used to post almost daily. And there are date gaps. Stretches of time around when the lawsuit was filed where nothing was published at all. That’s not what a brand simply switching to compliant music going forward looks like. That looks like content getting pulled down. 

I’ve watched this exact decision get made in higher education. A general counsel’s office identifies exposure across a year or two of prior content, and the fastest way to close it isn’t negotiation. It’s deletion. Two years of institutional storytelling, athletics highlights, event coverage, alumni features, promotion for the university, gone in an afternoon, because leaving it online costs more than losing it does. 

I’m not going to call any of this an admission of guilt. A settlement isn’t a legal finding, and I have no way of confirming what Quince’s internal reasoning actually was. But this is a cost nobody puts in a lawsuit filing. It never shows up as a settlement figure or a legal bill. It’s marketing work that was already done, already paid for, and now has to be rebuilt from nothing. If Quince pulled two years of content, that’s two years of production budget and creative hours that simply disappeared. It’s exactly the kind of cost an audit exists to help you avoid discovering after the fact, instead of before. 

The Ones That Never Make Headlines

It’s easy to look at a case like Quince and conclude none of this applies to you. You’re not a ten-billion-dollar brand. You’re not the kind of institution that ends up named in a lawsuit covered by trade press. This has never been a problem here, not yet. 

But the cases that make headlines aren’t the ones doing most of the damage. I’ve spoken with people on the other side of this business, and what they’ve told me matters more than any single lawsuit. One publisher told me they generate $10,000 to $20,000 a month identifying and licensing unlicensed use of their catalog. Another told me flatly: “We made $150,000 last year doing exactly that.” They come from volume. A few thousand dollars here, a licensing fee there, never large enough to be newsworthy, never large enough to generate a legal alert. Nobody writes an article about a $5,000 license fee. 

So run that math against your own budget, not Quince’s, not USC’s. What does a single unplanned 5,000 dollar license do to your department’s operating budget for the quarter? For most institutions we work with, that’s not a rounding error. That’s often the entire budget for a program. 

And the reason this works at scale for rights holders is the same reason it should concern you. Detection technology scanning content across platforms doesn’t distinguish between a ten-billion-dollar brand and a mid-sized city communications office. It flags the use either way. The AI-driven enforcement infrastructure already being built, the kind capable of identifying an unlicensed use, generating a notice, and issuing an invoice without waiting for a case worth a deadline, doesn’t care about your budget size either. 

Being too small to make the news has never meant being too small to notice.

Once It’s Public, It Isn’t Over

Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. Settlements aren’t quiet. They’re public record, and in an industry this closely watched, they get noticed. Legal alerts get published. Licensing teams at other labels and publishers read them. A settlement doesn’t just close one exposure. It tells every other rights holder watching that this organization used commercial music without a license, and that when it got caught, it paid rather than fought. 

I can speak to this from experience, not just observation. Early in my career, I worked for a music company that settled a licensing dispute directly with a well-known fitness platform. It was handled quickly and in good faith, and everyone came out of it on decent terms. 

Not long after, a different platform, this one in social media, started showing signs of its own music problems. There was a real opportunity to resolve it quickly and directly, the same way the fitness platform situation had gone. Leadership chose not to. The thinking was straightforward: wait to see if litigation formed elsewhere first, then attach to it. That wasn’t cynicism. It was the correct business decision, and everyone in the room understood why. A settlement tied to litigation is always worth more than a license negotiated quietly. 

That’s the part institutions consistently underestimate. You’re not always dealing with a rights holder who simply wants to be made whole. Sometimes you’re dealing with one who has a financial incentive to wait until your exposure is at its highest point before they ever pick up the phone. A public settlement isn’t the end of a story. It’s a signal. And once you’re the case study proving an organization will settle, you’ve made yourself a more attractive target, not a less risky one. 

The Gap Nobody’s Auditing

Most institutions I talk to already have a policy. Someone, somewhere in the organization, knows the rules. A communications director, a general counsel’s office, a media services manager who’s been doing this for years and knows exactly what commercial music use requires. 

But the person who wrote the policy is rarely the person posting the content. A student worker managing a university’s Instagram account. A junior staffer at a city agency putting together a promotional reel. A communications vendor working on a contract, assembling a video on a deadline, pulling whatever music sounds right. The policy exists. The awareness of it, at the point where the content is actually being made, often doesn’t. 

The gap is where the exposure lives. Not in bad intent. In the distance between the people who know the rules and the people making the decisions in the moment. 

The Institutional Music Licensing Audit

This is what an audit is actually for. Not a legal exercise. A way of finding out where that gap exists in your organization before a rights holder finds it for you. Five questions, and each one is a real diagnostic, not a formality. 

Can you document the terms that were in place at the time the music was used? Not what your policy says today. What was actually true, and provable, at the moment a specific piece of content was published. If you can’t produce that documentation quickly, you don’t have a defensible position; you have an assumption. 

Can you identify who owns the music and prove it? This is where AI-generated music creates a real problem. If a track has no identifiable authorship and no documented chain of title, there’s nothing to point to when someone asks who owns it. That’s not a legal technicality. It’s the entire basis of a defense. 

Would you be comfortable defending this license to a network, a government oversight body, or in court? Not “did we think it was fine?” Would the paperwork hold up if someone with the authority to ask actually asked? If the answer is you’re not sure, that is your answer. 

If a dispute arises, who is accountable, and who do you call? If nobody in your organization can answer that question quickly, you don’t have a plan. You have hope. 

Have you asked “Where are we allowed to use this?” Or have you asked, ”can we defend this use if we’re challenged?” These are different questions. The first one is about permission in the moment. The second is about what happens after. Most exposure comes from organizations that only ever asked the first one. 

Run this across your organization- not just your policy document- and you’ll usually find the gap in about an afternoon. It’s rarely a lack of rules. It’s a lack of visibility into whether the rules and the practice are the same thing. 

This Was Never About Getting Sued

I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters more than the legal argument. This isn’t about fear. I’m not in the business of telling institutions to be afraid of getting caught, and I’m not here to tell you to find a bigger music budget. I’m here because I believe something simpler. Every country has its own copyright law, and those laws exist because music has value, and artists deserve to be paid for creating it. 

That obligation doesn’t stop at a border, and it’s worth being precise about what that means. Under the Berne Convention, a piece of music created in any of its more than 180 member countries is automatically protected in the United States the moment it’s created. No registration. No filing with the U.S. Copyright Office required. There’s no version of “it wasn’t registered here, so it doesn’t really count” that holds up. Respecting an artist’s rights was never a matter of where they filed paperwork. It’s a matter of where the work came from. 

A world that stops compensating people for creating music is a world with less music in it. Less art of every kind, eventually, because the principle doesn’t stop at one medium. That’s not a place I want to see institutions, intentionally or not, contribute to. The audit isn’t a legal shield. It’s the practical version of taking that seriously. 

Where This Leaves You

The budget conversation isn’t wrong to have. Every institution should be asking hard questions about where its money goes. But “we can’t afford music” is the wrong conclusion from a real concern. The organizations that get this right aren’t spending more. They’re spending predictably, on something they can document and defend, instead of unpredictably, years from now, on something they can’t. 

At PrimalHouse Music, we build our catalog for institutions asking exactly this question. Clean chain of title. PRO-registered composers. Licensing terms built to hold up under the kind of scrutiny this article just walked through. If you want to run this audit against your own organization, we’re glad to help you find out what it actually shows. 

Ryan Neill, CEO, PrimalHouse Media Group