How to Legally Play Music in Your Business

Navigating the world of music licensing can be daunting. When music is used in a commercial or business space, there are certain rights that must be in place. It’s not the same as listening to music in a private setting.

In fact, it’s against the terms of use of Spotify, Pandora, Sirius XM, Apple Music, iTunes, YouTube, and other streaming services to play music from a personal account in a place of business – and it may be a copyright infringement.

You can read our interview with a music lawyer here.

Soundtrack assists all business types in solving this problem. We help ensure you’re able to legally play music in your business, so you can create the ambiance you want and leverage the research-backed benefits of playing brand-fit music, including boosting sales and keeping customers coming back.

With more than 100 million songs in Soundtrack’s music library and the functionality to play what you want, when you want, you can stay on the right side of copyright law without limiting selection, customization, and personalization.

So how does it work?

How to Play the Music You Want in Your Business

Unlike playing music for personal use, businesses based in the U.S. typically need three licenses to legally play background music for business use:

1. Public performance licenses

2. Sound recording rights

3. Publishing rights

Whether it’s a restaurant, drinking establishment, retail store, coffee shop, or any other type of business, it’s necessary to acquire these licenses to play in-store music. Let’s look at each of them, plus other music licenses a business might need, and how businesses around the globe can stay compliant.

• Public performance license: Contrary to how the name might sound, this license doesn’t refer exclusively to live music. Any time copyrighted music is played in a public environment, it’s considered a public performance, so this license is required. Here’s everything you need to know about public performance licenses.

• Sound recording license: Also known as a “mechanical” license, it allows businesses to stream and play the original sound recording of the music. It also covers reproduction, digital transmission, and distribution of copyrighted music.

• Publishing license: This license allows a business to use the original composition. Copyright owners control publishing rights so they can determine how their music is used and distributed.

Other Music Licenses

Here are a couple other licenses a business might need, depending on what they plan to do with the music:

• Synchronization license: If a business uses a copyrighted musical work in an advertisement or syncs it to an animated menu or any other type of moving image, this license is required.

• Live music license: Businesses that host live musical performances must ensure that any copyrighted music that is played on the premises is covered by this license. Even if a cover band, for example, says they have all the appropriate licenses, it’s still the business’s responsibility to make sure the music they play is in compliance with copyright law.

How to Obtain the Music Licenses You Need

All of these music licenses can be obtained directly from the copyright holders. This includes the artists themselves as well as performing rights organizations (PROs) in the U.S. and collective management organizations (CMOs) abroad. (Here’s a full list by global region.)

Here are the PROs that control music licensing in North America:

• BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc)

• ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers)

• GMR (Global Music Rights)

• SESAC (Society of European Stage Authors and Composers)

• SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada)

Dealing with individual PROs can be costly and time-consuming, and you would need to secure licenses with more than one if you want access to a sizable library of music. Whoever your favorite artist is, chances are the rights to their music are controlled by more than one PRO, and you would need to examine each song individually before playing it.

For example, for one artist, BMI may control full rights to some of their tracks, while they may share control over rights to other tracks with ASCAP or GMR.

Additionally, certain characteristics of your business space can affect which licenses you need. The small business exemption to the Fairness in Music Licensing Act may allow businesses to play music from broadcast radio or TV (but not from streaming, satellite radio like SiriusXM, or any other source) based on details like the square footage and how many speakers they’re using.

For a restaurant, the cut-off for this exemption is 3,750 square feet, and for other types of businesses it’s 2,000 square feet.

While some music is in the public domain, the Venn diagram of royalty-free music and popular music has relatively little overlap. No matter what type of music you want to play in your business, you’re probably going to run up against copyright law.

Rather than going through the expensive and complex process of navigating this on your own and paying music licensing fees to individual PROs, you can secure blanket licenses through a commercial music streaming service like Soundtrack.

In fact, when you add up the cost of ASCAP and BMI against a Soundtrack subscription, you’ll save 21-90% compared to what you would have paid for them individually.

Mitigating Risks of Being Fined 

If a business plays music that hasn’t been cleared for commercial use, it can run into fines and lawsuits. And it wouldn’t be just a slap on the wrist. Fines can range from a few hundred dollars per song, to hundreds of thousands of dollars for broader noncompliance. Plenty of businesses have shut their doors permanently due to legal fallout from playing improperly licensed music.

But securing the right licenses is about more than protecting business owners from potential legal action. It also ensures the songwriters, performers, music publishers, and other copyright holders receive royalties. To legally play music in your business also means the artists and bands you play get fairly compensated for their work.

At Soundtrack, we want to make it easy for businesses to have access to the widest selection of music, with all the licenses in place for them to use however they want. More than that, Soundtrack is the only business music service that offers on-demand music and gives you full control of your playlists.

It’s worth remembering why playing music in commercial settings is important in the first place:

In other words, getting the full benefits of playing music in your business requires more than a big file library and an aux cable. Read on to see how Soundtrack gives you the tools to improve your business through music.

Soundtrack Unlimited Puts You in Control

The Soundtrack Unlimited plan is one of the few streaming services that give businesses true control over the music they play.

You can curate your own playlists song by song or let our AI Playlist Generator handle the job for you based on a text prompt, or you can edit ready-made playlists to quickly build unique combinations you won’t find anywhere else. And there’s on-demand support too, so if there’s a request or you feel like changing up the music, you don’t have to wait until a schedule change.

This is in contrast to internet radio services, for example, that may only let you customize the music by hitting “thumbs down” on songs you don’t like – causing the track to awkwardly skip to the next one in the middle of the song.

Soundtrack Unlimited’s features give you true manual control if you want it. This includes an explicit lyrics filter, functionality for in-store messaging, and the ability to legally import your personal playlists from Spotify (Soundtrack began as Spotify for Business, after all).

Of course, if there are any musical works in your personal playlists that we don’t have the rights to, our platform will simply filter those out automatically. You won’t have to go through and manually remove them, and you won’t need to worry about staying compliant.

Additionally, Soundtrack allows you to delegate full control over the music to anyone with access to your account – or restrict them to volume control. You get unlimited invites, so you can let anyone you work with jump in and share responsibilities. But it also allows centralized control, so you get full oversight of what’s being played and where.

It takes seconds to sign up, pair your devices, click a few sound tags and drag around schedules to have an entire week’s worth of legal, brand-fit music ready to go. Further, while Soundtrack doesn’t make you purchase any hardware. You can use our Soundtrack Player or your current laptop, smartphone, or tablet to get started.