Do I need a license to play music in my business?

The licensing question is where most store owners first meet the music industry, usually through a letter that reads like a threat. The letters work because the system underneath them is real and almost nobody has had it explained straight. So here it is straight, from the statutes and the license agreements themselves, by someone with nothing to sell you.

The mechanism

When you play a song to customers, US copyright law calls that a public performance, and the performance right belongs to the songwriter and publisher. They don't license stores one by one. Four organizations do it for them in bulk: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR. You'll read in older articles that there are three. There are four. Each represents a different catalog, and a blanket license from one covers only that one's songs, which is how a store ends up needing several agreements to cover what an ordinary playlist actually draws from.

Note the thing the license covers: the performance, in your room. Owning the music is a different right. You can buy the CD, own the file, pay for the subscription, and the public performance right still sits with the writer. The purchase bought you private listening. The room full of customers is a separate right, and that separation is the entire system.

What it costs

The numbers are smaller than the letters imply. ASCAP's 2026 retail rate starts at $324 a year for a store with up to three speakers, capped at $2,715 for the biggest installations. BMI's starts at $311.71 a year for premises under 2,000 square feet and scales with floor area. SESAC and GMR don't publish rate cards; they quote. So a small store running direct PRO licenses is in the neighborhood of $700 to $1,000 a year depending on those quotes.

Most stores skip the paperwork and buy the bundled version. Business streaming services carry the licensing inside the subscription: Pandora CloudCover at $18.95 a month per location, SiriusXM Music for Business at $26.95, Soundtrack from $29 per zone, Mood Media by quote. SiriusXM's licensing page names all four PROs as covered. One subscription, no PRO relationships, and the service is contractually built for commercial rooms, which consumer Spotify is not. That last distinction has its own note: can I play Spotify in my store.

Ignoring all of it has a defined price too. Statutory damages for copyright infringement run $750 to $30,000 per song, and up to $150,000 per song when a court finds the infringement willful. Per song is the phrase to sit with. An afternoon of unlicensed music is a long list of songs.

The one real exemption

Congress carved out one honest free path in 1998, and it is narrower than the folklore version. Under 17 U.S.C. §110(5)(B), a store under 2,000 gross square feet (3,750 for restaurants and bars) can play radio or TV broadcasts to customers with no license at all. Larger premises can too, if the setup stays under six speakers total, no more than four in one room. Conditions apply: no cover charge, no retransmitting the signal elsewhere, and the source has to be an FCC-licensed broadcast station, or cable or satellite for TV.

The folklore version says small stores are exempt from music licensing. Read the statute again: the exemption covers broadcasts. Your playlists, your CDs, your streaming subscription all sit outside it, whatever your square footage. Even a radio station's own web stream is doubtful, since the statute names FCC-licensed broadcast and BMI's retail license explicitly treats internet webcasts as licensable. FM over the air, modest speakers, smaller room: exempt. Everything else: licensed.

Outside the US the structure repeats with different names. In the UK, PPL PRS sells a single joint license called TheMusicLicence. Wherever the store is, some organization holds the performance right and expects to hear from you.

The floor, and then the actual decision

Everything above is the floor. It makes you legal, and it says nothing about whether the music is doing anything for the store. That second question is the one almost nobody budgets an afternoon for, and it happens to be the one with forty years of research behind it: the music in the room moves how long people stay, what they reach for, and what the place feels like it should cost. The research is collected in the field guide, and the practical version starts at what music should I actually play in my store.

Most stores get the license sorted and never make the second decision. The subscription plays whatever it plays. The room does whatever the room does.

I'm a researcher, not a lawyer, and this page describes the US rules as published. For your specific situation, ask an attorney.