Most of the time, these things have no teeth. Trump is divisive and mostly offensive to Rock and Pop stars, so when he uses their music, they don’t like it. There’s usually nothing to be done about it in response. Sometimes there is. This time there definitely is, because this one is different.
Campaign rallies are one thing. You get a venue, the venue probably has a license to play pretty much whatever and whenever, and you, the campaign get your own blanket license just in case. The only thing that will trip you up is if the song you played happens to be on the DO NOT PLAY list, and you may or may not have checked that. If you didn’t, eh, you might still get away with it. The thing that will trip you up more reliably is if you’ve already annoyed that particular rock or pop star into POINTING OUT to you that their catalog is on the DO NOT PLAY list, so “don’t you DARE do it again.”
That’s probably the case here, since Trump annoyed The White Stripes in his first campaign and was told not to play Seven Nation Army at any more rallies or else.
But that’s not why it’s different. It’s different because this wasn’t a rally. This was a video posted on social media. There are no broad “any song I want” licenses for that.
Get permission before you put a popular song, or one from a production music library, into a video you plan to post on the internet. You might think you know what fair use is, but it’s not nearly the get-out-of-sticky-wickets-free card it’s Trumped up to be, in my opinion as (c’mon sing along) “NOT A LAWYER, but a forensic musicologist” who knows a thing or two about copyright law anyway.
