On August 21, 2026, Sony Music Entertainment and nine of its affiliated labels filed a federal copyright lawsuit against The Kroger Co. — the supermarket giant behind Ralphs, Fred Meyer, King Soopers, and dozens of other banners — alleging that Kroger's brands used its recordings in social-media advertising without permission, license, or payment. The complaint identifies at least 392 unauthorized uses of Sony sound recordings and names 18 current and former Kroger affiliates, including 84.51°, the company's retail-media and data subsidiary. The case is Sony Music Entertainment v. The Kroger Co., No. 2:26-cv-09358, filed in the Central District of California under the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.). It drew coverage from Billboard, Law360, Music Business Worldwide, Digital Music News, and the music-law trade press — one of the more closely watched filings on the IP Feed — with several outlets pegging the theoretical exposure near $58.8 million.
What sets this suit apart from the AI-training disputes that have dominated the IP Feed lately is that there is no novel technology at its center — just a grocery chain, an Instagram grid, and a stack of songs no one licensed. It is the latest and largest filing in a fast-moving enforcement campaign in which the major labels have stopped treating unlicensed music in brand social posts as a nuisance and started treating it as systematic infringement worth suing over. For anyone who markets with music — which is to say nearly everyone — this is the case that says the free ride is over.
What the lawsuit says
The core allegation is simple. Kroger's brands, the complaint says, ran promotional videos across Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms — posts pushing stores, products, and weekly sales — set to popular Sony recordings, and did so without the licenses that commercial advertising use requires. Sony says it catalogued at least 392 separate infringing uses across accounts operated by Kroger and its banners.
Two features give the filing its edge. The first is the influencer component: many of the posts at issue were created by paid influencers hired to promote Kroger brands. Sony argues that the company cannot outsource its way out of liability — that a brand which directs, approves, and benefits from a sponsored post is on the hook for the music in it, even if a creator is the one who tapped "add sound." The second is history. According to the coverage, Kroger had previously entered licensing deals with Sony that covered social-media use — meaning, Sony contends, this is not a company that misunderstood the rules but one that knew them and stopped following them. That framing matters for damages.
The number everyone latched onto — roughly $58.8 million — is not a demand or a forecast. It is arithmetic: statutory damages under the Copyright Act can run up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, and 392 works multiplied by that ceiling produces the figure. Courts rarely award the maximum, and the real exposure will turn on how many works are proven, whether the infringement is found willful, and what a jury decides each is worth. The defendant has not yet answered the complaint, and no court has ruled on its merits. What follows is the legal question the filing raises — not a prediction of how it comes out.
The hard part: the license you think you have
Most of these cases never reach fair use, and this one is unlikely to be an exception. Using a hit record to sell groceries is commercial, non-transformative use at the core of what copyright reserves to the owner — the weakest possible ground for a fair-use defense. The real fight is elsewhere, on two questions that routinely catch sophisticated companies off guard.
The first is the scope of the license nobody read. When a brand adds a song from Instagram's or TikTok's in-app music library, it feels licensed — the platform put it there. But those commercial music libraries are generally cleared only for personal, non-commercial posts; business and advertising accounts are carved out, and the labels license those uses separately and for real money. The gap between "the app let me" and "I was licensed" is exactly where this litigation lives.
The second is secondary liability for someone else's post. When a hired influencer soundtracks a sponsored video, is the brand on the hook? The governing doctrines are contributory infringement — knowingly inducing or materially contributing to the infringement — and vicarious infringement — having the right and ability to control the conduct, plus a direct financial benefit from it. Sony's theory is that a brand paying for promotion, approving the creative, and reaping the sales has both the control and the benefit the doctrine requires. How courts draw that line — between a brand that merely reposts and one that effectively commissions the infringement — is one of the genuinely unsettled questions this wave will help answer.
Why it matters beyond one lawsuit
Kroger is not being singled out; it is being made an example. Over the past two years the majors have turned social-media enforcement into a program: Sony's 2024 suit against Marriott flagged more than 900 instances before settling; Warner Music sued the cookie chain Crumbl over some 159 recordings and settled in 2026; UMG and Concord sued the retailer Quince; and Sony reached a settlement in principle with DSW around the same time it filed against Kroger. The strategy is to pick large, well-resourced brands, document infringement at scale, and let the settlements set the market price for a license the brand should have bought up front.
For rights holders, the lesson is that a catalog is only as valuable as your ability to police it — and policing at this scale requires knowing, precisely, which recordings you own and where they are turning up. For everyone on the other side of the table — advertisers, studios, agencies, and the independent creators who increasingly market their own work — the lesson is the mirror image: know what you've cleared. The same provable chain of ownership and clearances that lets a label prove infringement is what lets a filmmaker or a brand prove they had the rights all along. When the dispute is whether a use was licensed, a clean record of what you own and what you've licensed for which purpose is not paperwork; it is the difference between a routine renewal and a seven-figure surprise.
We'll track this docket as it develops. The first real signals will come as Kroger files its response and its defense takes shape — whether it disputes the count, leans on platform licenses, or tries to push liability back onto the influencers — and as the court begins to test how far a brand's responsibility for a sponsored post extends. Follow the filings, counsel, and coverage on the case page.
This post is editorial commentary on public court filings and news coverage, not legal advice. The allegations described are unproven, and the defendant has not yet responded on the merits. Damages figures reflect statutory maximums cited in press coverage, not any court finding.