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trademark

Taylor Swift Filed a Sound Mark Application for an Amazon Music Ad and the Examining Attorneys at the USPTO Will Probably Shake It Off the Register for Failing to Function as a Mark

The NBC chimes are three notes. The MGM lion roars. The THX "Deep Note" is six seconds of escalating dissonance seemingly designed to terrify children in movie theaters. Those are signatures — short, isolated, repeatable acoustic identifiers a consumer hears and immediately associates with a single source. That's what a sound mark is supposed to be.

Here is what Taylor Swift filed at the USPTO on April 24, 2026, as a sound mark, with audio attached as the specimen:

"Hey, it's Taylor Swift, and you can listen to my new album, 'The Life of a Showgirl,' on demand on Amazon Music Unlimited."

That is U.S. Serial No. 99784980. The USPTO classified it as a sensory mark. The companion application, filed the same day, has a similar specimen built around a Spotify ad read.

The coverage has been almost uniformly cheerful: Swift is registering her voice to fight AI deepfakes, and you, business owner, should consider doing the same. The framing skips past what the filings actually say. What Swift filed is a streaming-service promo read. It identifies an album drop. It identifies a distribution platform. The "mark" is embedded inside an advertisement for something else.

Even though Taylor has mad love for trademark filings, this ad is bad blood for functioning as a mark

Trademark use requires that the mark function as a source identifier — that consumers hear it and connect it to a single commercial source. The Lanham Act doesn't technically require the mark to be short, but the case law on sound marks effectively does, because longer sounds tend to be heard as content rather than as branding. A listener who hears "Hey, it's Taylor Swift, and you can listen to my new album..." doesn't process the audio as a brand identifier. They process it as an ad for an album, in which Taylor Swift happens to be talking.

Northeastern law professor Alexandra Roberts told Northeastern Global News that the Swift clips are "not the kind of identifiable 'marks' that typically qualify under trademark law." The USPTO hands out failure-to-function refusals for slogans, hashtags, and informational matter on a regular basis. A 30-second promo read sits in the same conceptual neighborhood.

Alright, alright, alright! McConaughey did the same thing but better

The "trademark yourself" idea keeps pointing back to Matthew McConaughey, who secured eight USPTO registrations, all owned by his J.K. Livin Brands Inc., over the course of 2025. Those include a sound mark on "Alright, alright, alright!" — three words. A catchphrase he's been associated with since 1993. Not embedded in an ad. The kind of short, isolated, repeatable acoustic identifier sound-mark doctrine was built around. McConaughey's team filed in December 2023, two years before approvals issued and well before any AI deepfake of him surfaced.

Swift's filings are doing something more ambitious, and they came after a federal lawsuit had already landed for the album the specimens reference. They're trying to use the sound-mark category to lock down a longer recording of her voice in service of an AI-deepfake enforcement theory. If the USPTO registers them as filed, that's a meaningful expansion of what sound marks can be. The likelier outcome is a Section 2(e) or failure-to-function refusal, after which the strategy gets a lot harder to scale, because every artist trying to copy the move would need to invent or commission a short, distinctive audio signature rather than just submitting promo audio they already recorded.

What trademark can actually do against deepfakes, and the blank space where federal name-image-likeness law should be

The popular framing is that trademark registration is either a magic AI-deepfake shield or it's nothing. Neither is right.

Where a celebrity has a deep, well-used trademark portfolio — and TAS Rights Management has more than 170 active and pending registrations across albums, merchandise, fragrances, cosmetics, jewelry, and apparel — a deepfake selling AI-generated Eras Tour merch, a knockoff Taylor Swift perfume, fake concert tickets, or branded jewelry is squarely within registered classes. Likelihood-of-confusion analysis under Sleekcraft and du Pont sweeps in adjacent goods through the trade-channels and consumer-confusion factors. The federal court venue and nationwide injunctive remedy that come with registration are real upgrades over the state-by-state right-of-publicity patchwork. The portfolio breadth is doing the work, not any one filing.

What trademark does not reach is the deepfake harm most people actually care about — the fake political endorsement, the AI-generated harassment image, the synthetic interview clip that goes viral. Those aren't selling anything. There's no source confusion. There's no commercial use of a registered mark. They're publicity-rights and false-light harms, and the legal toolkit is a patchwork of state right-of-publicity laws plus a handful of voice-clone statutes like Tennessee's ELVIS Act.

That patchwork is a bad way to handle a national problem. There should be a federal name-image-likeness statute. The reason celebrities are filing creative trademark applications is that the statute that would actually fit doesn't exist yet, so they're reaching for the closest tool available and hoping examiners will stretch it. Some of those filings will get registered. Most won't. Either way, the underlying problem isn't a trademark problem and trademark won't solve it.

Speaking of bad blood...

Swift's two sound mark specimens both feature repeated reference to "The Life of a Showgirl." The USPTO refused her application for Life of a Showgirl as a word mark last year, citing likely confusion with Maren Wade's pre-existing registration for "Confessions of a Showgirl." Wade — whose legal name is Maren Flagg — sued Swift for trademark infringement on March 30, 2026 in the Central District of California. Flagg v. Swift et al., No. 2:26-cv-03354.

So one of the world's most famous singers is currently being sued for using a phrase she didn't successfully register, while filing new sound marks built around recordings of her saying that same phrase, in ads for the album the lawsuit is about.

Long story short: this isn't McConaughey.

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