Our partner Joe Bogdan, who practices in the IP licensing and copyright arena out of our Chicago office, was consulted for a trade publication article focused on the evolving changes in music licensing rights for commercial use. The article was published by AdvertiseMint, a digital advertising agency that specializes in Facebook and Instagram advertising.

With the rapid growth in online video marketing campaigns, so to is there an increased demand for the use of copyright-protected music and video content within those campaigns. To that end, Facebook recently signed licensing deals with two major music publishers to allow users to upload videos to Facebook, Instagram, and Oculus with music from UMG and Sony/ATV, the latter providing more than three million licensed songs. The deals apply to Facebook users, but they don’t apply to advertisers that run video ads on Facebook’s platform, thereby requiring commercial users to obtain their music licensing rights separately.

Bogdan sees a future when advertisers could eventually use music licensed by Facebook’s music publishing partners—but only with the right technological advancements. Bogdan envisions a feature in Facebook’s Ads Manager that allows advertisers, during the ad creation process, to request the use of a specific song. That request could then be automatically sent to the music owners who can approve or disapprove the request, thereby streamlining the music licensing process using a more automated process.

To read or download the entire article click HERE.