The Key To Using Popular Music In Your Business

Welcome to Episode 154 of the Own Your Genius podcast, where we empower business owners to use their education and their experiences to create dope businesses. I am your host, Attorney LaConya Murray. Listen, listen, listen. Last week’s DNC’s roll call was not only an unconventional twist on the typical straightforward nomination night, right? It was also a straight flex. The Democratic party chose that night as an opportunity to have fun by having each state create their own soundtrack to their nomination. So why is that a flex? We’re going to talk about it. But before we dive into today’s podcast episode, make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast so you don’t miss a single episode on how to own your genius.

Welcome back to the Own Your Genius podcast where we discuss building businesses, growing brands and what else? Only your genius. I’m your host, Attorney LaConya Murray, owner of Off The Mark IP Solutions. Off the Mark is a boutique intellectual property firm representing innovative entrepreneurs aka geniuses who are looking to protect their brand and grow their business with ongoing legal support and business mentorship. We have a good one for you today, so let’s get started.

Why was having each state choose their own song a flex? Because each artist that they chose had to give their permission. And that’s a flex. And why did they have to give their permission? This goes back to copyrights. If you’ve been following me on social media, I posted something a couple weeks ago about needing to get the photographer’s permission to use Vice President Kamala Harris’ image and likeness on a shirt, right? So now we’re talking about music.

When you have a copyright, when you own the copyright, especially as a musical artist, it gives you certain rights. And those rights include reproduction, distribution, public performance, and the right to create derivative work. What that essentially means that if you want to… use this music, using artists’ music in any type of way, for the most part, you’re going to have to seek their permission. And we know that this is not always the case. Artists don’t always get their permission. Just think about it. If you look at Donald Trump, how many cease-and-desist letters has he received? At least 10. I’m just going to go through a couple of them real quick. The Isaac Hayes estate gave a cease-and-desist letter for him using, hold on, I’m coming. Beyonce sent one for freedom. Celine Dion sent one for her work. Sinead O’Connor, Neil Young, Adele. I mean, the list goes on. Elton John, Tom Petty’s estate. All these artists and the estates that control the rights, because those rights don’t die when you die. If you are an individual on the rights to copyright, they actually extend. They actually last 70 years past your death, meaning your estate has control over who can and cannot use your stuff. That’s why you heard me say a lot of estates, you know, estate this, estate that. But the real question here that I get a lot is like, what is considered a public performance? Because a lot of y’all don’t know, which is kind of scary and kind of crazy, but I need you to know exactly what is considered a public performance.

If you know what you need to do if you plan on using music, here it goes. A public performance. If you plan on playing music in a public place with people other than your friends and family, it’s a public performance period, point blank. If you’re playing music in your salon, as you’re doing your client’s hair, public performance, if you’re playing music at your, at your conference, you know, nowadays the conference, they have music, they have DJs, they have the speakers walking down to their theme music. Guess what? Public performance. If you’re playing music in your restaurant, in your office, in your retail store, public performance, which means what? You need a license, people. Can’t just be doing stuff all willy-nilly. I know the internet seems like it’s like the wild, wild west out here. You can do whatever you want to, whenever you want to, but you cannot simply because you could get sued.

And we’re talking about licenses. There are different types of licenses. We have, of course, your public performance license, which gives you permission to use the music in your performance. But then there’s also a license that I think people need to know about, which is called a synchronized license, which is required if you plan on syncing music to any type of visual content. The synchronized licenses are required if you plan on using them with promotional videos or commercials. When we talk about licenses, you need to make sure you have the right type of license, because in addition to, you know, paid licenses. They have a lot of places out there where you can get royalty free content, which simply means that there’s not a fee to use that music, but you have to read the license carefully. You have to make sure that you’re using it in the right way.

A commercial license, what that’s going to do, it’s going to involve any type of content that’s going to be used to generate revenue for your business. So maybe you’re not using it on a commercial, right? But maybe you’re using it on another post with the intent of driving traffic to your website. The end. The overall intent is business generating revenue. That’s the overall intent. That’s why we’re doing this. We call it free marketing, but it’s really not free. Some of y’all here just doing the wrong thing. Oops, my bad. Didn’t mean to say that. And then again, you have personal use. You have commercial use. That commercial use is going to give you permission to use the music in a way that generates revenue for your business. That personal use, it’s just the opposite of that. It’s for you to use personal in-house for your…you know, for yourself, you’re not trying to generate any type of revenue off of it or make any type of money off of it. And the reason that’s important is because I’ve seen cases where people have a license and they go to these sites and they’re like, oh, the license specifically says for personal use only, then they will take it and they will use it for commercial purposes.

I see that when people use it for different sites. I also see it when people are on social media because especially when they first started allowing us to use music on like Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and all those things. People are like, oh my business account doesn’t have access to the good stuff. Well, you don’t have access to the good stuff. And they would take their personal account and turn it into something they use for their business just so they can have access to this music. Listen, that doesn’t work. Just because you have a personal account and you have access to this music, if you’re using that personal account, for business purposes and you’re using that music on your business post, you’re violating the license because you’re not using it for personal reasons. It doesn’t matter what type of account you have. So cut it out. And the other thing as it relates to kind of the internet and social media, I see a lot is that people are using music in their paid advertising. Like they’re running ads for music in it. Please get a license. Because another thing, another way that people, even with business accounts, they would do to get around that, oh, I can’t, you know, this platform won’t let me use these particular songs. So they will go and add the songs externally. You know, they will create the content and they’ll upload the song, but they don’t have a license for it. Cut it out. Don’t do that. That will get you in trouble.

And the reason I bring this up, because I see it, I witnessed it a lot. You know, people, you’ll go into someone’s establishment and they will have their Spotify playlist on or their Pandora playlist on. And unless you have a commercial license and those platforms make it easy for you to use it for commercial purposes, because you can go in there and say, Hey, I’m using this for commercial purposes and it will charge you whatever free they’re going to charge you. But then at least that way you have permission to use it and you don’t have to risk any type of outrageous fees for copyright infringement. And that’s all I’m trying to do people. I’m just trying to make sure that you are doing stuff the right way to keep you out of court, keep your accounts from being frozen because you have a judgment against you that you have to pay because you ran into someone’s copyright because you wanted to use music. Because I understand the power of music and how it can be used to tell a story, how it can be used to regulate emotions, how it can set the mood, get people hype or calm them down or do all sorts of things. And as business owners, we want to be able to tap into that power and we can. We can tap into that power, but we need to respect the artist’s rights and we need to make sure that we have the proper license when we are doing so. So, geniuses, thank you so much for tuning in. What I want to know is, what did you take away from today’s podcast episode? If you found today’s episode insightful, make sure you share it with a fellow entrepreneur and do not forget to subscribe, rate, and leave reviews.

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