The ‘Cheese Tax’ Lawsuits Prove Viral Sound Is Not Free Wallpaper

A song about dogs demanding cheese has become an unusually sharp test of the influencer economy: when a meme becomes useful to a brand, who gets paid? The lawsuits against LG and Kroger over the viral TikTok track “Cheese Tax” suggest that many marketers still see popular audio as ambient internet weather—something to stand under, not something to license.

Georgia singer-songwriter Matt Hobbs, creator of Puppy Songs, filed the suits in a California federal court, alleging that both companies used the track in social media videos without permission. Hobbs wrote, recorded and released “Cheese Tax” in February 2023; Digital Music News reports that the song has reached 4.05 million Spotify streams. The complaints seek actual damages or the statutory maximum of $150,000 per work for alleged willful infringement.

The cases remain allegations, not verdicts. But the underlying commercial lesson is already clear: going viral does not erase ownership. If anything, virality makes the ownership harder to ignore.

The joke was free. The recording was not.

“Cheese Tax” feels like the quintessential internet novelty: a short, dog-themed song built around a household ritual, then repurposed by thousands of pet owners. The original concept is intimate and deliberately lightweight. The documentation on Puppy Songs describes it as a song about dogs expecting cheese whenever people cook or open the cheese drawer.

That informality is precisely what makes brands misread it. A meme can look like public property because everyone is participating in it. But participation is not permission, and familiarity is not a license. The song’s cultural ubiquity may make it feel less like a conventional commercial recording, yet the creator’s work remains attached to a person who wrote and recorded it.

The distinction matters because these were not merely fans posting a dog video. The allegations concern corporate social media use, where the audio helps a company sound current, funny and culturally fluent. The brand receives the attention dividend; the creator may receive nothing. That is not a quirky loophole in meme culture. It is the old advertising bargain with the paperwork removed.

TikTok’s music library is not a universal brand pass

One of the most persistent marketing myths is that audio available inside a social platform is automatically cleared for every purpose. The reporting around the cases points to the opposite. TikTok’s pre-cleared music library is approved for personal, not commercial, use, and “Cheese Tax” was not featured in TikTok’s Commercial Music Library, according to the Kroger complaint.

That should be basic compliance, not a surprise discovered after a cease-and-desist letter. Yet the platform’s frictionless interface encourages the opposite behavior. Pick a sound, attach it to a clip, publish. The product design makes rights management invisible, while the legal responsibility remains visible to whoever owns the work.

Kroger allegedly posted a video in December 2025, received a cease-and-desist letter in March 2026 and deleted the video the following month. If the allegations are accurate, deletion did not automatically resolve the dispute. Removing a post can stop ongoing exposure; it does not necessarily convert unlicensed use into licensed use after the fact.

LG’s case adds another warning sign. The complaint alleges not only direct infringement but also violations involving copyright management information, including passing off the video and song as its own and removing or altering information when the clip was downloaded and reuploaded. In other words, the danger is not limited to choosing the wrong trending sound. How a brand handles the source file and attribution can become part of the dispute.

The real problem is a broken value chain

The industry has spent years teaching audiences that viral sound is disposable. A creator makes the hook; users turn it into a format; brands arrive once the format has proved its reach. The creator’s labor is treated as the least important link because the culture appears to belong to everyone.

That model is backwards. The more a sound performs as a distribution mechanism, the more commercial value it carries. “Cheese Tax” was reportedly used in 21,400 TikTok videos in 2023, according to data cited by Deseret News, while the song’s creator had already built a recognizable body of work through Puppy Songs. The track was not an anonymous scrap of audio that materialized from the feed. It had an author, a release and an audience before corporate accounts tried to borrow its momentum.

The cases also arrive in a broader environment of music-rights litigation involving brand advertising. Music Business Worldwide reported in August that Sony Music sued Kroger over alleged unlicensed uses of sound recordings in social media advertising. That does not decide the “Cheese Tax” disputes, but it makes the pattern difficult to dismiss as one unlucky grocery post.

Our view is that marketers have confused meme speed with legal ambiguity. The internet moves quickly; rights still require an answer. A campaign can be spontaneous in tone and carefully cleared in execution. Those are not opposing goals.

Licensing should become part of meme literacy

The likely cultural shift is not that brands will stop using viral audio. They will simply have to become more deliberate about it. That could mean negotiating directly with independent creators, using commercial libraries, commissioning brand-safe adaptations or building campaigns around original sounds rather than borrowing whatever is currently peaking on the feed.

Creators, meanwhile, gain leverage when a recognizable sound has a clear identity and commercial track record. The “Cheese Tax” disputes show why attribution alone may not be enough: a tag can acknowledge a creator, but it does not necessarily grant the right to use the work in advertising. The next generation of social campaigns will need both cultural fluency and licensing fluency.

The verdict is simple: brands should stop treating viral audio as wallpaper. If a sound is distinctive enough to make an ad work, it is valuable enough to clear. The cheese tax is not really about dogs, groceries or televisions. It is the bill for years of pretending that the internet’s most effective creative work belongs to whoever posts it last.