Opening a second location changes more than your payroll and your supply orders. It also changes your music licensing obligations, and this is where a lot of owners get caught off guard. A single-location license worked fine when you had one storefront. Once you add a second site, a third, or a whole franchise network, that same approach starts to break down.
The core issue is simple: licensing isn’t tied to your business as a whole, it’s tied to each place where music is played publicly. That means every additional site needs its own coverage, and the work of managing that coverage grows right along with your footprint.
Why Licensing Doesn’t Scale the Way You’d Expect
When you play music in a business, whether it’s background music in a lobby or a curated program on the sales floor, you need public performance rights for that use. This is a separate requirement from simply owning or streaming music for personal use, and it applies at the location level, not the company level.
So if you run three coffee shops, you technically need licensing in place at all three, not just the flagship store. Add a fourth location next year and the same rule applies again. There’s no volume discount built into the traditional PRO model, and there’s no single license that automatically extends to new addresses as you open them.
This is manageable with one or two sites. It gets complicated fast once you’re managing five, ten, or fifty. Renewal dates stack up. Paperwork multiplies. If your locations span different countries, the requirements shift again, since licensing rules in the United States don’t mirror those in Canada or the United Kingdom. What counts as compliant in one market may not transfer to another.
The Administrative Cost Nobody Budgets For
Multi-location licensing done the traditional way usually means a separate PRO account, a separate invoice, and a separate renewal cycle for every site. Someone on your team ends up tracking all of it, often in a spreadsheet that gets out of date the moment a new location opens or an old one closes.
This isn’t just inconvenient. It’s a real compliance risk. A lapsed license at one location is still a lapsed license, even if every other site is fully covered. Auditors and rights holders don’t care that the oversight happened at a single branch rather than company-wide.
There’s also a consistency problem that has nothing to do with paperwork. When each location licenses and programs music independently, the customer experience varies from site to site. One store might use a professionally curated program, another might rely on whatever the manager happens to play that day. For brands that care about a consistent look and feel, this inconsistency undercuts the whole point of having multiple locations in the first place.
Who’s Actually Responsible in a Franchise Agreement?
Franchises add another layer of confusion. In many franchise agreements, music licensing is never explicitly assigned to either party. The franchisor may assume each franchisee is responsible for licensing their own site, since they’re the one operating it day to day. The franchisee may assume licensing is bundled into the brand standards or vendor agreements handed down from corporate.
Both assumptions can be wrong, and the gap between them is where problems show up. If a franchisor hasn’t addressed licensing in the operations manual, individual franchisees are left to figure it out on their own, with wildly different levels of diligence. Some will get proper coverage. Others may play music without realizing they need a license at all, or may license through a different PRO than a location two towns over.
This inconsistency creates risk at the brand level, not just the location level. A public compliance issue at one franchise location reflects on the brand name, even if the franchisor technically had no direct legal obligation for that specific site. It also makes it harder to guarantee a consistent in-store audio experience across the network, which is often part of what franchisees are paying for when they buy into the brand.
The fix isn’t complicated, but it does need to be intentional. Franchise agreements should state clearly who handles licensing, and ideally, that responsibility should sit with a single system rather than being left to each individual operator’s judgment.
A Simpler Way to Manage Licensing Across Locations
Instead of stacking up individual licenses per site, a growing number of multi-location businesses and franchise networks are moving to a single managed music licensing solution that covers every location under one account.
This works differently from the traditional model. Rather than tracking separate PRO relationships for each address, coverage is bundled into one subscription. Every location plays from the same library of licensed music, and the licensing itself is handled behind the scenes. New locations can be added without starting a new licensing process from scratch, and there’s one invoice to review instead of a dozen.
For franchise operations specifically, this also solves the responsibility question. When licensing runs through a single account, it doesn’t matter whether the franchisor or the franchisee manages the day-to-day music program. Coverage travels with the account, not with whoever happens to be running a given store that year.
There’s a practical side benefit here too. A managed service typically comes with curated playlists built for different business types, so locations can maintain a consistent atmosphere without each manager building a music program from scratch. Pricing is also more predictable, since it’s based on a straightforward subscription structure rather than a patchwork of individual PRO fees that vary by location and country.
The Bottom Line as You Scale
The math on this is fairly clear once you lay it out. Managing licensing site by site means more renewal dates to track, more room for a location to slip through the cracks, and more inconsistency in what customers actually hear when they walk in. Centralizing that licensing under one account removes most of that overhead in one move.
This matters most for businesses that expect to keep growing. The gap between “we have licensing figured out” and “we have a real compliance problem” tends to widen with every new location you open, not shrink. Getting ahead of it while you’re still small enough to make the switch easily is a lot less painful than trying to untangle a dozen separate licenses after the fact.
If you’re weighing whether to keep managing licenses location by location or move to a single account, the deciding factor usually isn’t cost alone. It’s how much time and risk you’re willing to carry as your locations multiply. For most growing businesses and franchise networks, the answer becomes obvious well before the tenth location opens.