A brand reaches out after discovering your track through a campaign video. They love it. They offer a fee. You say yes, and their agency sends a one-page agreement: all rights, worldwide, in perpetuity, with the right to edit and sub-license.
You thought you were licensing a song. They thought they were buying one.
This is not a bad-faith move by the brand. It is a misunderstanding built into how most advertising budgets are structured. Brands have spent decades paying for music under a work-for-hire model, and they bring that same logic to every deal. The moment an artist does not correct that assumption in writing, they have already lost ground.
The fix is a written master license, signed before any campaign goes live. Musilock includes one built for this situation, because 'we'll sort the paperwork later' is the sentence that costs musicians rights they never meant to give away.
Why brands arrive with the wrong assumption
The standard model in advertising music is work-for-hire. A brand hires an agency. The agency hires a composer. The composer writes a jingle or a sonic identity for the campaign. The brand owns what comes out of that session: the composition, the master recording, all usage rights, forever. They paid for it, so it is theirs.
That model works when you commission new music from scratch. It does not apply when a brand wants to use a song that already exists and belongs to someone else.
Anurag Rao manages sync deals for major labels across India and places catalog music into brand campaigns. He describes getting on calls with brand legal teams specifically to explain this distinction. The brand position is almost always the same: they are paying top dollar for the music, so it should be theirs to use however they want. That logic is not unreasonable for a work-for-hire job. It is the wrong logic for a sync deal.
A master license says what the brand can do. Work-for-hire says they can do anything. Those two sentences are not the same deal.
What a master license actually grants
When you license an existing master recording to a brand, you are not selling the song. You keep the copyright. You keep the master. You are authorizing the brand to use that specific recording in specific ways, for a specific period, in specific places. Everything outside what the contract defines stays yours.
A master license for a brand campaign should cover all of the following:
- Which recording is being licensed (track title, version, ISRC if available)
- Permitted media channels (TV, digital platforms, social media, out-of-home, radio)
- Territory (a single country, a region, or worldwide)
- License term (a fixed end date; perpetual rights should cost substantially more)
- Whether the brand can modify or remix the track
- Whether the brand can sub-license the recording to third parties
Without those terms on paper, the only thing you have is a payment. A brand's lawyer can argue that payment implied broad rights. Your lawyer can argue it did not. That dispute is expensive and slow for a fee that probably did not account for it.
A contract that covers all of those terms is not complicated to draft. Musilock generates one for this exact situation, bilingual and ready for e-signature, so the conversation about scope happens before any money changes hands.
Where independent artists are most at risk
Major labels have legal teams to hold this line on every deal. Independent musicians almost never do.
The pattern is familiar: a brand contacts you, the fee is real, there is goodwill on both sides, and the agreement looks short and simple. You sign because the deal feels right. But 'all rights, worldwide, in perpetuity' in three lines of boilerplate means the brand can sub-license your track to other companies, release it on streaming under their imprint, and use it in campaigns you never discussed.
This is not hypothetical. It is the scenario that sync professionals spend time correcting after the fact, in situations where the contract language was left deliberately vague and neither side pressed to define what it actually meant.
Work-for-hire is a different deal, not a worse one
Sometimes a brand does not want your existing music. They want you to create something new for the campaign. That is a work-for-hire arrangement, and it operates completely differently.
In a work-for-hire deal, you are paid once, upfront, and you assign all rights in the finished recording to the brand. No royalties after delivery, no ownership, no say in future use. The brand owns what you made the moment you hand it over.
That can be a fair deal if the fee reflects what you are giving up. The problem comes when brands apply work-for-hire pricing to the purchase of catalog rights. They want complete ownership but offer a licensing fee that does not account for what a full rights transfer would actually cost.
Knowing the difference lets you price correctly and reject terms that do not match what you are actually being asked to give.
One question to ask before you agree to anything
When a brand approaches you about using an existing track, the first question to settle is whether they are licensing the song or buying it outright.
If they are licensing: you need a master license. Define the media, territory, term, and what they can and cannot do with the recording. A perpetual worldwide license should cost substantially more than a one-year single-platform deal.
If they want ownership: that is a work-for-hire deal. Price it as one. You are not exchanging a song for a fee; you are giving up every future right to that recording.
Most of the confusion happens because neither side raises the question early. The brand sends broad language and assumes you will accept it. You receive broad language and assume the scope is reasonable. Both sides proceed on different understandings of what was agreed.
You can draft a master license yourself. Musilock exists for the musicians who need one ready when the brand comes calling but cannot pause the conversation to find a lawyer.