If you play music in your business, you have two ways to get legal, whether you’re in the US or Canada. You can license it yourself by dealing directly with the performing rights organizations, or you can use a service that bundles the licensing and the music together into one package.
Most business owners never realize there’s a choice to make. They assume playing music at work means either paying a streaming subscription and hoping for the best, or figuring out some complicated legal process on their own.
Neither assumption is quite right. Below is a fair look at both routes, what each actually involves day to day, and which one tends to make more sense once you weigh the real time and cost.
The DIY Route, Licensing It Yourself
Handling licensing yourself is a legitimate option, and for some businesses it’s the right call. Here’s what it actually involves.
Music played in public is represented by performing rights organizations, or PROs, and in the US the main ones are ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR. In Canada, the equivalent organizations are SOCAN and Re:Sound. Each one licenses a different catalog of songwriters and publishers, so your first job is figuring out which performing rights organizations cover the music you actually play, since the catalogs differ enough that it’s worth understanding before you commit to anything.
Once you know which PROs are relevant, you apply for a license with each one separately. That means separate applications, separate fee schedules, and separate points of contact. Fees are typically based on factors like your business type and square footage, and they change from year to year, so it’s worth checking what an ASCAP license costs before you build out a budget, since BMI and SESAC price things a bit differently.
None of this is impossible, and plenty of business owners do sort it out on their own, particularly if they have a small, well-defined set of music sources or an in-house team that already handles compliance work. But it does mean a genuine investment of time up front, and ongoing attention after that.
The Hidden Work in Doing It Yourself
The part that catches people off guard isn’t the licensing itself. It’s what happens after you sign up.
To be fully covered, you generally need a license from every PRO whose catalog you might play, not just one. Skip a PRO and you could be playing music you don’t have permission for, even if you’ve paid someone else. That’s the nature of how the catalogs are split up.
Then there’s the ongoing admin. Each license renews on its own schedule, at its own price, and fees can shift year over year without much warning. Multiply that across three or four organizations and you’ve got several separate relationships to track, several invoices to pay, and several renewal dates to remember. Miss one and you’re out of compliance without necessarily realizing it.
And licensing only solves half the problem. A PRO license gives you legal permission to play music. It doesn’t give you the music itself. You still need to build playlists, keep them fresh, avoid content that isn’t appropriate for your space, and make sure nothing you’re playing pulls in ads or copyright claims from a streaming platform that was never built for commercial use in the first place. If your business plays a lot of background music, building out something like music for restaurants or a retail playlist takes real thought, and that’s a separate job from the licensing paperwork entirely.
None of this makes the DIY route wrong. It just means the license is the beginning of the work, not the end of it.
The Licensed Service Route
An all-in licensed service handles both halves of the problem at once. The licensing across the relevant PROs is arranged on your behalf, so you’re not tracking down individual agreements or renewal dates yourself. The music is curated specifically for commercial use, which means it’s cleared for public play from the start rather than something you’re hoping holds up.
The practical difference shows up on your bill. Instead of several separate PRO fees that renew on different schedules and shift from year to year, you have one predictable monthly cost. You can see how that’s typically structured on the pricing page, where the licensing and the music are already part of the same package rather than two things to buy separately.
For a business owner who just wants music playing in the background without becoming an expert in performing rights law, that trade is usually an easy one.
Which Makes Sense For You
There isn’t a universally right answer here, but there is a fair way to think about it.
Direct licensing can make sense for businesses with very specific or unusual needs, or for larger operations that already have staff dedicated to handling compliance and vendor relationships. If that’s genuinely your situation, going direct with the PROs is a workable path.
For most cafés, restaurants, bars, retail shops, and similar spaces, though, a licensed business music service tends to come out ahead on every measure that matters. There’s less admin because someone else is tracking the renewals. There’s less risk because the coverage and the content are handled together instead of being two separate things you have to get right. And once you add up several individual PRO fees alongside the time spent sourcing and managing playlists, the total cost usually lands higher than a single service subscription that covers both.
The bottom line is that licensing music for your business doesn’t have to mean juggling multiple accounts and hoping your playlists stay compliant. If you’d rather spend that time running your business instead, that’s worth weighing before you start filling out applications with individual PROs.