12 Reels. $210k. A Warning to Every Brand Using Trending Audio.

In April 2026, Indian media group Zee Entertainment filed a lawsuit against Nykaa, the multi-billion pound beauty retailer. The claim: Nykaa used Zee’s copyrighted music across twelve Instagram Reels to promote products to its millions of followers. The damages sought: approximately $210,000. Reuters broke the story in early May.

The lawsuit runs to more than 900 pages and includes screenshots of every offending Reel. Nykaa’s lawyers have since confirmed all twelve flagged Reels were taken down. The case continues

The Mechanism Most Marketers Don’t Realise Exists

The case turns on a distinction most marketing teams have never had to think about: personal versus commercial use.

Zee holds a licensing agreement with Meta. That agreement permits individuals to use Zee’s tracks in personal Instagram posts. It does not extend to brands using those same tracks in promotional content. Nykaa, the lawsuit alleges, treated Instagram’s music library as an open-source asset and used the tracks anyway.

That’s the gap. The platform makes the music available. The brand assumes that means it’s cleared. The label disagrees, and now the label has a precedent it wants to test.

Why This Case Matters Beyond Two Indian Listed Companies

The temptation is to read the Nykaa case as a regional story. It isn’t.

Music labels have spent the past decade watching short-form video become the primary engine of brand marketing. Production-music libraries that brands have leaned on for years without much scrutiny. The volume of unlicensed commercial use is enormous. Until recently, the cost of pursuing it was higher than the revenue it would have recovered.

That maths has changed. Labels now have automated tools to identify their tracks across platforms. Court precedents on personal-versus-commercial use are starting to settle. And cases like Nykaa’s give them a template: file, attach screenshots, point at the licensing agreement, ask for damages.

The result is a backwards-looking risk most brands haven’t priced in. The Reel that ran last week is the obvious exposure. The Reel that ran three years ago, posted by a marketer who has since left, is the harder one. It’s still live. It’s still indexable. It’s still infringing.

The Back Catalogue Problem

Most enterprise brands have years of social content sitting across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of pieces. Music decisions made by team members long gone. Tracks added before anyone in the current marketing department was responsible for clearance.

Auditing that back catalogue manually is impossible. Even knowing which tracks belong to which label, and which labels are likely to act, is its own research project. The brands that get caught aren’t the ones being reckless today. They’re the ones who can’t see what’s already been posted.

What We Built

Medialake’s music dashboard was built to handle exactly this. It scans your social content for tracks tied to specific labels, including the ones most active in pursuing damages, and surfaces every Reel, post and video using them. From there you can take them down, replace the audio, or route them for clearance.

It’s not a hypothetical risk anymore. The Nykaa lawsuit is the latest high-profile case to put a number on it. There will be more.

If you’d like to see what’s sitting in your back catalogue, we run audits for marketing teams. Get in touch.