Rights teams already know the hard part is not proving that your music is on TikTok or Reels. The hard part is finding the commercial uses quickly, at scale, with clean attribution and enough evidence to turn those uses into licenses (or enforce when needed).

Third Chair is built for that specific workflow: monitor, enforce, and license. Below is a practical, non-hand-wavy look at how Third Chair finds brand uses across TikTok and Instagram Reels, and how those detections become a repeatable revenue and enforcement pipeline.

What counts as a “brand use” on TikTok and Reels?

In rights enforcement, “brand use” usually means a use that is tied to marketing value, commercial distribution, or paid amplification. On TikTok and Reels, that often shows up as:

• Brand-owned posts: a company posting from its own handle using your track.

• Influencer campaigns: a creator posts as part of a sponsorship, gifted campaign, affiliate push, or paid deliverable.

• Paid social ads: a video running as an ad (including whitelisting/boosting where a brand runs paid spend through a creator’s post).

• Agency or reseller activity: agencies, performance marketers, or intermediaries deploying creative at volume.

Why this matters: each scenario tends to have different licensing expectations, different responsible parties, and different “next steps” for outreach.

If you want a deeper breakdown of who typically needs a license across these influencer and ad scenarios, Third Chair’s explainer on influencer campaign music licensing is a helpful companion.

The detection challenge: why TikTok and Reels are harder than “traditional” Content ID

Social platforms introduce three practical problems that classic fingerprinting alone does not solve:

1. Distribution fragmentation: TikTok and Instagram each have their own creative formats, repost behavior, and audio handling. Then those videos get cross-posted to other platforms.

2. Commercial intent is not always explicit: the same audio can appear in organic fan UGC and in an influencer deliverable that is later boosted as an ad.

3. Operational friction: even after you find a use, you still need evidence preservation, the right contacts, and a workflow that makes sense for Legal and Business Affairs.

Third Chair’s approach is built around solving detection and downstream action together.

How Third Chair finds brand uses: the end-to-end workflow

1) Catalog onboarding that is rights-ops friendly

Detection quality starts with clean inputs. Third Chair supports major identifiers and rights protocols used by labels, publishers, distributors, and administrators, including DDEX, ISRC, ISWC, IPI, SoundExchange, and MLC.

That matters because strong metadata improves matching, reduces ambiguity between similar recordings, and makes results easier to operationalize across teams.

2) Audio fingerprinting plus verification for reliable attribution

Third Chair uses audio fingerprinting to match audio in short-form video back to your assets. It also layers in a combination of vendor coverage, proprietary modeling, and human verification to keep attribution trustworthy.

Third Chair states 99.9% accuracy in IP attribution. In practice, that accuracy claim is only valuable if it holds under the messy realities of social audio, including:

• Short clips and partial uses

• Speed changes and pitch shifts

• Voiceovers and loud SFX

• Edits, transitions, and mashups

The goal is simple: reduce false positives so your team is not spending time chasing the wrong uses, and reduce false negatives so you do not miss the uses that actually drive revenue.

3) Cross-platform monitoring across the surfaces where brands actually show up

Brands do not only post “nice” brand-owned videos. A lot of commercial value sits in influencer content, paid amplification, and repost networks.

Third Chair monitors uses across major social platforms and surfaces, including TikTok and Instagram (Reels), and can also track activity on X, Facebook, and YouTube.

Here is a practical way to think about “surfaces” Third Chair is trying to capture.

4) Brand-use classification: turning “a match” into “a commercial lead”

A fingerprint match tells you what was used. It does not always tell you why it was used or who is behind it.

Third Chair’s workflow is designed to surface advertisers and commercial actors using your music. That is the difference between a dashboard full of matches and a pipeline of licensable opportunities.

Common signals that can help indicate a brand use include:

Third Chair also reports engagement across platforms (views, likes, comments, shares, saves, duets, remixes, sound uses, mentions, reach). That matters because commercial prioritization is typically value-based: you want to focus first on high-reach, high-spend, high-reputation uses.

5) Evidence preservation at the moment of detection

Social content disappears, gets edited, or gets toggled private. For enforcement and even for straightforward licensing conversations, your team needs a defensible record of what happened.

Third Chair automatically preserves proof of use when a match is detected, before a bad actor can deny the use ever happened. This is especially important for paid social and time-limited campaigns where creative rotates quickly.

6) Contact enrichment so outreach does not stall

Many rights teams lose momentum after detection because they cannot reach the right person at the brand or agency.

Third Chair includes verified contact discovery (email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses) to boost reply rates and reduce dead ends, which is key when your outreach window is time-boxed.

If you are building your outreach playbook, Third Chair’s guide on best practices for outreach emails covers message structure, recipients, and follow-up cadence.

7) From monitoring to outcomes: enforce, license, or both

Finding brand uses only creates value when it drives an outcome. Third Chair supports two core tracks that often run in parallel:

• Licensing: Convert unauthorized ads and commercial uses into licenses, and close more sync on socials.

• Enforcement: Escalate when needed, with strong evidence and a clear record of attempted resolution.

For a practical decision rubric on when to license versus when to pursue takedown or escalation, Third Chair’s February 2026 framework on licensing vs takedowns is worth saving.

For teams that require external legal support in certain territories, it can also help to have relationships with established counsel. For example, if you need Caribbean-based legal capabilities, a firm like Henlin Gibson Henlin is a reference point for international practice coverage.

What rights teams typically do with Third Chair detections

The highest-performing teams treat TikTok and Reels monitoring like an operational funnel, not a one-off investigation.

A common pattern looks like this:

• Triage by commercial intent (brand-owned, paid ad, influencer campaign, organic UGC).

• Prioritize by value signals (reach, engagement, repeat advertiser behavior, campaign footprint).

• Decide the first move (license outreach first for commercial uses, enforcement readiness in parallel).

• Track outcomes so the same advertiser is faster to resolve next time.

This is where Third Chair’s “measure every use” reporting and preserved evidence become more than analytics. They become the backbone of a repeatable licensing and enforcement system.

What to ask when evaluating whether Third Chair can find your brand uses

If you are a label, publisher, distributor, or IP investor evaluating Third Chair, these are the questions that map most directly to results:

• Coverage: Does monitoring reliably span TikTok and Reels, and does it extend to the platforms where the same creative gets reposted?

• Attribution trust: How are difficult matches handled (short clips, heavy edits, voiceover)? What is the human verification layer?

• Commercial classification: How are brand uses and advertisers identified and separated from general UGC volume?

• Evidence standards: What is captured, when is it captured, and is it organized in a way Legal can use quickly?

• Workflow fit: Can you onboard with the metadata and identifiers you already maintain (ISRC, ISWC, DDEX, etc.)?

• Conversion tooling: Are contacts discoverable and exportable so outreach can happen without stalling?

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Third Chair only work for major labels and big catalogs? Third Chair works with rights holders across the spectrum, including labels, publishers, distributors, creators, and catalog investors. The key requirement is having the rights context and identifiers needed to onboard your catalog cleanly.

How does Third Chair tell a brand use from regular UGC? A match is enriched with signals that indicate commercial behavior (brand accounts, sponsorship disclosures, advertiser patterns, brand mentions, amplification context) so teams can prioritize licensable uses.

Can Third Chair help if the video gets deleted or edited? Third Chair automatically preserves evidence at detection time, which helps protect against disappearing creative and denial of use.

Is this the same as YouTube Content ID? It is similar in that it relies on attribution, but the workflow focus is different. Third Chair is designed for social-first monitoring and for converting brand uses into licensing and enforcement outcomes, especially across TikTok and Reels.

What metrics does Third Chair report for a detected use? Third Chair reports engagement across major platforms, including views, likes, comments, shares, saves, duets, remixes, sound uses, brand mentions, and audience reach, unified in one dashboard.

Turn TikTok and Reels detections into licensing revenue

If your team is seeing brand uses slip through the cracks, the fastest win is not another spreadsheet. It is a system that reliably finds commercial uses, preserves evidence, and helps you reach the right counterparties.

Third Chair helps rights holders monitor, enforce, and license across TikTok and Reels so unauthorized brand uses can become a scalable income stream.

Explore Third Chair at usethirdchair.com.