Please Clear Up The Commercial Use Rules for Tiktok/Reels Sound Use

Hello all!

My company would like to start creating fun videos on reels and tiktok using viral sounds and dances. We wouldn’t be selling anything on the videos, just having videos of our outward facing employees with the goal of raising awareness for who we are. I want to be able to clear up what our commercial limitations are with that. There are so many seemingly small companies who are using viral sounds and I am curious if they have to pay to get the rights to each of those sounds or are they allowed to use them because they aren’t selling anything in the videos? Or are they just using them until they get their hands slapped?

What are the guidelines for this? Any links would also be helpful!

I appreciate your help in advance!

Hey Sage and welcome to the community!

My understanding is that there are songs that are pre-cleared for businesses. Small companies may be using songs that are not pre-cleared if they are using a normal account vs a business account. The business account restricts a lot of the songs to the ones that would be safer for the business.

Here’s a few links to Tiktok and their Tiktok Sound for Business:

https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/commercial-music-library?lang=en#

This is in the first link I added:

The Commercial Music Library is for TikTok users that use TikTok for marketing, advertising, sponsorships, endorsements, or publicity, including official brand accounts . . .

It seems that if you’re on a brand account when you go to the catalogue it’ll send you straight to the approved sounds so you don’t have to guess.

Sounds that are from Tiktok should stay on Tiktok though for copyright reasons of course. Since they have their own agreements and re-uploading it somewhere else (like shorts or reels) could bring trouble to you.

I believe it also seems that companies can use sounds made by users, but there’s also risks to that if they’re re-uploading a sound that they don’t have commercial rights to.

Hi Kaz,

Thank you for your quick response! This definitely helps clear things up.

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Happy to help Sage! :blush:

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Hi @ssutton thanks for posting! I’d love to tag our @Instagram_Experts and @TikTok-Experts for their suggestions even though @eternalkaz seems to have given a great answer.

Experts…what are your thoughts?

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Hi Sage!
Here’s some IG info about trending sounds too. Personally, I often will switch my account type to something different like Creator to unlock trending music. However, this is technically infringing on copyright laws. If you are logged in as business, you can go to a person’s reel and click on the bottom right square for the audio. If it says “Use Audio” or lets you save it, you’re good to go. This article has some more info on it. How to Get Music on Instagram Reels if You Don’t Have the Full Audio Selection — Your Social Team

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That article was really helpful! Thanks!

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Glad it helped!