True story.
We had the licensing rights to a UK based animated character in a previous life in Japan. It gave them a nice steady but not an exorbitant amount of royalty income.
One year, one of the posh international hotels whom we'd licensed to sell some of their merchandise in the gift shop got the bright idea that playing some of the theme music from the film at the hotel lounge would entice their guests into buying some of the merchandise. It actually did and the sales had a noticeable bump during the week or so they ran the promotion.
Unfortunately, one of their agents happened to be present at one such lounge session and presented us with a bill demanding payment of royalties for the "performance." It was for a few hundred dollars given the limited nature of what we really didn't consider a performance but a promotional initiative of our licensee whose work had translated into far more sales in merchandise.
Nevertheless, they wouldn't accept our reasoning and pressed for payment of what amounted to a lot less than the cost of their trip to Japan.
We told them they wouldn't like the result, but they insisted on their pound of flesh. Even though we wrote them the check out of our own funds, the sub-licensee found out about it and pulled their merchandise from the gift shop. This led to several other sub-licensees doing the same. Japan is like a huge small town and word gets around fast.
Their license revenue went from several thousand annually for several consecutive years at the time to exactly zero one year later. With several thousand characters from around the world vying for a spot in Japan's market, nobody wanted to deal with an idiot like this. Of course, we signed off our licensing rights so they could peddle them elsewhere in Japan. But there were no takers.
Post 23 was quite interesting.
Hopefully you sent some derisive mocking letters to this company’s brass insulting them and their genius rep.