In many ways, the world of intern and social marketing has been the wild west over the past few decades. Yet, despite being perceived as a lawless land of anything-goes advertisements and campaigns, many brands and creators are quickly learning harsh lessons about copyright laws and regulations that can result in content being muted, blocked, or taken down.
If you’re looking to successfully navigate the wild world of internet and social media marketing, we’re here to help you understand how to avoid music copyright infringement in your campaigns. We’ll do this by going over the basics of copyright rules, as well as provide you with one of your best solutions for keeping your campaigns and content in the clear with royalty free music.
So, to help you launch off with the best start possible, here’s everything you need to know about avoiding copyright strikes, infringements, and takedowns with your online marketing campaigns.
The importance of digital marketing campaigns
Once considered a small, new niche, digital marketing campaigns have become big business. With the rise of social media, and now a heavy preference for short-form vertical-style social video apps like TikTok, Instagram, and others, audiences online are bigger than ever before.
If you’re an advertiser, brand, or solo creator, a successfully launched and managed social media campaign can result in huge returns. These days, major brands invest millions, if not billions, of dollars into their digital marketing, and if you’re not doing it too, you’re simply missing out.
With that being said, the real trick is not just getting into the action, but to launch campaigns that are focused, directed, and ultimately successful. One of the biggest mistakes many marketers make with their campaigns, though, is not following copyright laws and violating the terms of service with different apps.
To help you navigate these waters, let’s go over what you need to know about working in this space with the different options out there, as well as how to know if a song is copyrighted.
Understanding the types of music copyrights
As a way to explain how to avoid copyright infringement in your marketing campaigns, let’s quickly go over some basics about how copyrights and music licensing work. The first thing to understand is simply that every song has natural copyrights associated with it. These copyrights extend both to the artist who recorded the music and to the artist who wrote the song.
(Also, sometimes copyright extends to the record labels or other parties who produced or own the license as well. Read this article to learn more about the details of music copyrights.)
If you want to use any copyrighted music in your videos or content, you’ll need to negotiate with the copyright holders for the songs. This protects the artists and ensures that musicians and songwriters are compensated for their hard work and talent.
And, as we’ll explore below, if you try to surpass these copyrights and illegal music that you haven’t legally licensed, you could end up in big trouble with different social video platforms. Following are some simple tips to avoid copyright infringement that can keep your campaigns safe across social platforms.
How to legally use copyrighted music
If you’d like to legally license music to use in your campaigns, you’ll need to proceed in one of three ways:
- Only use music that you’ve written and recorded yourself.
- Reach out to artists directly and negotiate a way to use their music for specific uses.
- Use a music licensing company like Soundstripe to provide you with royalty free music that has been fully licensed and cleared for all uses.
We’re going to assume that you’re most likely to be interested in the third option, as it’s usually the best and most popular for most content creators. And, in truth, it’s the way the industry has been heading for many years.
This is mainly because it’s an excellent way for artists to be fairly compensated for their awesome music, while also being the safest avenue for content creators to rest assured that the music used in their videos will be fully covered and safe to use for all their content needs.
How to avoid copyright infringement on different platforms
As mentioned above, only once you’ve answered the above questions will you truly be able to avoid copyright infringements with your advertising campaigns. We’ll explore a bit below, but the same processes can be applied to most of the popular social video platforms these days, including Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Facebook.
Make sure you research the guidelines on each platform around who is ultimately responsible for user content and each individual platform’s penalties for violating copyright. Each platform has different terms laid out as they pertain to content ownership. As an example, if you share someone’s post or image without their consent, will you be held liable for infringing on their copyright? It varies from platform to platform.
Given the vast amount of content shared daily, it’s tempting to reuse material. But that can put your entire campaign in jeopardy, and you risk all your hard work being taken down by the platform with a single copyright infringement notice. How can you avoid copyright infringement while still keeping campaigns engaging? The answer lies in using licensed assets like royalty free music and stock visuals.
We always recommend being absolutely sure that everything you post is entirely in the clear– i.e., use stock photos, original video, and royalty free background music that you own the rights to use.
More tips for avoiding copyright infringement issues
In a perfect world, every company has a big enough budget to create all original content for their videos. They can hire a crew to capture original footage, actors to embody the perfect mood, and musicians to create all original background music. But we live in the real world where budgets are limited, and we often end up having to throw together videos on a tight budget and even tighter schedule.
With all that pressure, how can you avoid using copyrighted music and visuals? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Obviously, as a music source, we specialize in helping marketing teams find the perfect royalty free background music for any campaign. Still, we’ve also got some tips and tricks for finding other kinds of quality content without violating an existing copyright.
Some of the most common mistakes advertisers make regarding copyright infringement issues stem from sharing or re-sharing content from individuals who have music, IP, images, or elements that have not been properly licensed.
This is because the copyright rules for individual accounts versus brand accounts are quite different. Joe Smith in Missouri can post a Katy Perry song to his story without raising any flags. However, if a brand incorporates that content into their marketing campaign, it enters a different set of rules and regulations.
And, trust us here, the consequences of music copyright infringement can be quite severe and litigious. Not only are you liable for having your content muted or taken down, but your brand’s channels can be blocked, deleted, or even banned.
On top of that, using the work of others without proper licensing can result in lawsuits that can be endlessly expensive and devastating for companies both big and small.
Are you at risk for a copyright infringement lawsuit? Here’s a helpful article on how to avoid this very issue.
How to stay in the clear with your content
Luckily, if you’re a Soundstripe customer or partner, you’ll have many resources available to you, not only to keep you safe and in the clear, but also to clear any claims or issues that may arise with any platforms or channels.
Looking specifically at YouTube, which is by far the biggest platform for campaigns and creators, here’s how to easily clear a copyright campaign. If you’ve used Soundstripe tracks, sound effects, or video assets in your videos or campaigns, you can clear any copyright claims by following the steps in this video.
As you can see, Soundstripe provides all of the tools you’ll ever need to clear YouTube content claims automatically, or in case something goes wrong, by simply providing your URL to our Content ID page.
How to find the best royalty free music for your marketing campaigns
At the end of the day, despite there being a few resources available for those looking to solely make use of creative commons music and content that might technically be cleared for anyone to use, but often not of a high-quality or redundant nature.
In fact, some tracks with a “Creative Commons” license seem like they’d be okay to use, but actually are only licensed under specific circumstances: i.e., non-commercial use (which wouldn’t work for a marketing campaign) or with the creator’s specific permission (to name a couple).
Ultimately, your best bet when looking for quality royalty free background music will be choosing a reliable source with a history of supporting artists and one that is committed to providing thousands of original tracks at a fantastic price, i.e., SoundStripe.
You get the benefit of being able to find the perfect music for any video and campaign, all without the headache of ever worrying about violating copyrights or having your campaign taken down by a social media platform.
If you’re ready to take your digital marketing campaigns to the next level with better royalty free background music, check out our incredible library of completely royalty free music.
Further reading
Interested in reading more top resources and getting our best filmmaking tips and tricks? Here are a couple of our most popular articles from across the Soundstripe blog:
