Silly me, I thought YouTube was the public domain already! Given that 90% of the songs are owned by 10% of the record companies, if they challenged the songs' free availability it would be noticeable?

One advantage of indy artists BTW and IME is that they are usually friendly and helpful and likely to give you permission.

Still, it would help if publishers and hosts like smashwords and unbound.co.uk had policies on this and told us what they were, before we start writing and adding cultural realism to our settings pointlessly.

IRL I met a girl aged about 14 in the Maidan in Kiev in 2004 who hardly spoke a word of English but she knew every song by the Sex Pistols. The former drummer of Depeche Mode lives in Chernihiv where the band once performed live in Red Square and still has a large following.

Hence, my character sings Bohemian Rhapsody when it plays on the radio in Odessa (which is common and realistic). So it will suck if the record companies trample on us for trying to write realistic fiction which does them no harm, anyway. Such challenges seem nothing more than opportunistic greed.