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Originally Posted by Lanny_McDonald
Not entirely accurate. Fair use doctrine does allow for the use of limited portions of a song, book, or performance "for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports." Making this even more murky is "there are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work." So yes, you can use short snippets of a song, lift a lyric from a song, or use a snippet from another broadcast for commentary or criticism. You may NOT use another's content in its entirety without written permission.
Cool fact not many people know. The soundtrack for a movie is one of the most expensive parts of the production. Licensing each song is very expensive and can pile up once production has completed. For example, the production company of Varsity Blues paid $500,000 to license AC/DC's Thunderstruck. This was a record at the time, but I'm sure there are more costly ventures out there now. The bigger the hit and the more recent the song, the more expensive it is to license the material. You can imagine the cost of a jukebox production like Rock of Ages where they use a catalogue of hits for the stage/movie.
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Stephen King used to start chapters of some of his books with song lyrics - just a line or two. Now maybe they just gave him permission but I bet he didn’t pay. And this was when he was relatively new.
We used to do a Christmas musical video. The fee was about $5K to use a copyrighted song and even then we had to take down the video within a couple months IIRC.