Sony Says Kroger Used Its Songs 392 Times Without a License

Sony Music filed suit against Kroger on August 21 in the Central District of California, case 2:26-cv-09358, naming 19 corporate defendants and at least 392 unauthorized uses of its recordings in social media advertising. The defendants read like a shopping list of banners most people never connect to one another: Ralphs, Harris Teeter, King Soopers, Mariano’s, Home Chef, Fred Meyer Jewelers.

One detail in the complaint does more work than the headline number. Sony licensed The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic” to Kroger for a seven-week holiday campaign that ran from November 13 to December 31, 2020. A Ralphs video using that recording was still viewable on August 17, 2026, four days before the filing. The license expired almost six years ago. The post never did.

Sony’s argument leans on that history rather than on ignorance:

“Having previously negotiated and paid for such licenses, the Kroger Parties cannot claim ignorance of the licensing requirement.”

Kroger holds at least fourteen Sony licenses signed between 2017 and 2025, several of which covered internet and social media use explicitly. So Kroger knew clearance existed, and had paid for it repeatedly. The posting kept going anyway, across nineteen entities and a roster of paid creators.

The legal knowledge was never the missing piece. The missing piece was a name next to the job of checking.

Liam Doolan, founder of Copyright Check AI, sells software that audits brand social accounts for exactly this, so read him with that in mind. His description of where the failure sits matches what the complaint lays out:

“The gap is almost never intent. It is that nobody owns the audit.”

Why the platform library is the trap

Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat all ship an in-app audio library, and adding a track takes one tap. Those libraries are licensed for people posting about their lives. A brand account, or a paid creator promoting a brand, sits outside that grant and needs a commercial sync license, the same instrument a TV spot needs. Doolan puts the distinction plainly:

“The assumption that a track available in a platform’s audio library is cleared for brand use is simply wrong. Those libraries are licensed for personal use.”

Nothing in the posting interface says so. The song is right there and the button says add. The difference between a clean post and a six-figure claim is a licensing category the app never mentions.

Here’s the part that should worry anyone running a creator program. Sony is seeking to hold Kroger responsible for posts made by influencers it hired, on the theory that the company directed, approved, or benefited from the content. The complaint cites a May 7, 2025 collaboration post involving Pick ‘n Save, Mariano’s and Metro Market on a creator account. You didn’t upload it. You don’t control the account. The label is pointing at you anyway.

That’s the same logic we covered when Google’s ad automation left the advertiser holding the liability, and when the EU’s AI Act put the labelling duty on the advertiser rather than the tool. Delegation moves the work. It doesn’t move the exposure.

Sony also says it warned Kroger in June 2025 and that new posts kept appearing as recently as August 12, 2026. Fourteen months of notice, and the pipeline kept running.

The counter-case: that $58.8 million is doing a lot of pretending

The figure in most of this week’s coverage is $58.8 million. It’s worth understanding where it came from before anyone repeats it in a board deck.

The complaint never states it. Somebody derived it, by multiplying $150,000 in maximum statutory damages by 392, and PPC Land traces the math to Copyright Check AI, the same vendor selling the audit. That multiplication conflates two things. Statutory damages are awarded per infringed work. The complaint alleges 392 uses. One recording running across a dozen store banners is one work, not twelve, so the real ceiling is lower and nobody outside the case has published it.

Doolan’s other figure deserves the same treatment. He says audits show 82% of brands run unlicensed music with average exposure above $10 million. That’s a vendor describing its own sales funnel, not a measured industry rate. Companies that agree to a copyright audit are not a random sample.

Both things are true at once. The circulating number is inflated by a party with an interest in inflating it, and the underlying exposure is real: this is the fifth major-label action against a brand in under three years, after Marriott, DSW, Crumbl and Quince.

What this actually costs you

Statutory damages are the ceiling, not the forecast. DSW settled. Most of these settle. The real cost lands sooner and quieter: legal review dropped into a workflow built for speed, a back catalogue of live posts nobody has time to re-clear, and a creator contract that now needs a music clause with someone to enforce it.

Kroger is a Fortune 25 retailer with a legal department. As Doolan noted, it “is not a company that lacked the budget or the legal function to get this right.” If the failure mode is structural rather than budgetary, a 20-person team with no in-house counsel and a shared content calendar has the same gap, only smaller and less worth suing.

The verdict is uncomfortable because it’s mundane. No novel legal theory here, and no new technology. A track got added, a campaign ended, the license lapsed, and the post stayed up for six years because expiry was nobody’s calendar item. Every brand running a creator program and a multi-banner calendar has that gap, and the labels have spent five years proving they’ll litigate it.