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What a Music Licence Costs a Cafe, Bar or Restaurant, and When You Don't Need One

TheMusicLicence, the joint PPL and PRS for Music licence UK venues need to play copyrighted music, starts at £364.62 a year before VAT for a small pub and £400.81 for a restaurant or cafe, by PPL PRS's own figures. What VAT adds, what pushes the bill higher, who is exempt, and why a venue that never got round to it can be billed for six years of past music use.

Alex Riesenkampff

17 August 2026 · Updated 3 September 2026 · 16 min read · Markdown

Play copyrighted music where a customer or a member of staff can hear it, and you need TheMusicLicence. No venue is small enough to be exempt on size alone. PPL PRS prices a pub or bar of up to 400 square metres playing background music only at £364.62 a year before VAT, and a restaurant or cafe of up to 30 seats at £400.81 (PPL PRS, Pubs & Bars and Restaurants & Cafés, correct as of September 2026).

Most owners already suspect they need one. The expensive surprises come later: what VAT does to the invoice, why the streaming subscription you already pay for doesn't count, and what PPL PRS can charge you for the years you played music before it got in touch.

One invoice, two copyrights

TheMusicLicence bundles two separate rights, and a venue needs both to play a single released track legally. PPL and PRS for Music are distinct collecting societies. PPL "distributes these music licence fees for the use of recorded music on behalf of record companies and performers"; PRS "distributes music licence fees for the use of musical compositions and lyrics on behalf of songwriters, composers and publishers" (PPL PRS, TheMusicLicence, what is it).

One right covers the recording your speakers play. The other covers the song underneath it, the tune and the words somebody wrote, whoever happens to be singing them. Playing music in public, under your own roof, to your own customers, is a separate act from broadcasting it, and needs permission from both sets of rights holders under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (PPL PRS, Background Music). The two are sold together for a stated, practical reason: "One contact. One invoice. One licence" (PPL PRS, TheMusicLicence).

What a small venue pays

A background-music-only licence for a venue under 400 square metres starts under £400 a year before VAT, and every use beyond background music is priced on a separate tariff on top. PPL PRS publishes worked examples for a venue of 400 square metres or less. A restaurant or cafe up to 30 seats, background music only, costs £400.81 a year, £1.10 a day. A pub or bar of the same size costs £364.62, or 99p a day. Swap the background music for a jukebox and the pub figure becomes £616.24 (PPL PRS, Restaurants & Cafés and Pubs & Bars).

Then add VAT, which is where the number people budget for stops matching the number on the invoice. Every cost example PPL PRS publishes is quoted before VAT, and the UK standard rate is 20% on most goods and services (GOV.UK, VAT rates). So the cafe example is £480.97 to pay, the pub example £437.54, and the jukebox example £739.49. Whether you recover any of that depends on your own VAT registration, but the gross figure is what leaves the bank account.

Those numbers are the cheapest case PPL PRS chose to publish. They are not a typical bill. Orange Jelly, a pub-trade adviser, works from real licensee cases rather than one worked example. It puts typical annual costs at £500 to £800 for a small background-only pub, and £800 to £1,500 once a DJ or occasional live act joins in. A venue running regular live music lands at £1,500 to £3,000 or more, all excluding VAT (Orange Jelly, PRS and PPL Music Licensing for Pubs). That gap isn't a contradiction. It's the distance between the quietest use case PPL PRS chose to headline and what venues declare once seating, footfall and real usage are counted.

Getting an accurate number means going to PPL PRS directly, since a quote depends on "your type of venue and how you use music in your day-to-day operations" (PPL PRS, Restaurants & Cafés). Its checklist covers staff numbers and hours, which areas play music, the device used, the square metreage where it can be heard, phone lines if you run music-on-hold, and the scale of any live events, karaoke nights or jukeboxes.

A few hundred pounds a year is a rounding error next to what changed in business rates bills this April. It is still worth budgeting for properly rather than guessing at, because guessing wrong here has its own separate cost, covered below.

Who is exempt, and who only thinks they are

PPL PRS's own exemption is narrow enough that almost no trading venue qualifies. The only discretionary carve-out it publishes covers "homeworkers (within a private residence working on their own) or... workplaces with only one worker, where music is not made available to any visitors/customers coming onto the premises" (PPL PRS, Help). The moment a second staff member, a customer or a delivery driver can hear the radio, it's gone.

A second point of confusion isn't a licensing exemption at all: the Live Music Act 2012. Between 8am and 11pm it removes the need for an entertainment licence under the Licensing Act 2003 for unamplified live music with no audience cap, and for amplified live music at licensed premises to an audience of 500 or fewer (GOV.UK, Entertainment licensing changes under the Live Music Act). That is a premises-licensing question, about whether your council needs to approve you putting on live music at all. TheMusicLicence is a copyright fee owed to the people who wrote and recorded the songs. Holding one exemption does nothing to the other. A pub that reads "Live Music Act exemption" and assumes it covers a Friday-night acoustic set has conflated two regulators answering two different questions.

Is there a loophole? The royalty-free question

There is one legal route around TheMusicLicence, and it is to stop playing the music PPL and PRS represent. GOV.UK puts it in a single line: "You do not need a licence to play royalty-free music" (GOV.UK, Get a licence to play live or recorded music). PPL PRS does not dispute it. Under its own FAQ heading "I use a royalty free music supplier, do I still need a licence?", it answers that "TheMusicLicence covers virtually all commercially released music available. Where you have chosen not to use that music, there are a number of circumstances where you may not need TheMusicLicence" (PPL PRS, TheMusicLicence).

It also tells you the administrative step almost nobody mentions. "If you do not think that the music you use is covered by PPL PRS you should ask for confirmation from your supplier. If you then forward the confirmation through to us, we will update our records" (same source). Do that in writing, and keep it. It is the difference between a quiet record update and an argument later.

The catch is that it has to be all of your music. Not the playlist and the radio. Not the playlist and the England game. One morning of breakfast radio, one chart track off a member of staff's phone, one Christmas compilation, and you need TheMusicLicence after all. For a venue whose atmosphere is built on music people recognise, that trade is usually a worse deal than the licence. For a bakery that just wants something pleasant behind the counter, it can be an easy call.

Paying a background-music vendor is a different thing again, and the language can obscure it. Mood Media, one of the larger commercial suppliers, states that its "background music service is covered under Mood's licensing agreements, in respect to Mood Media-provided service(s) only" (Mood Media, Licensing FAQs). Read carefully, that covers music streamed through Mood's own platform, and says nothing about anything else played on the premises. PPL PRS's account of how these suppliers operate is a useful check: they "obtain permission from PPL and PRS for Music to allow them to copy music and supply suggested playlists to their customers" (PPL PRS, Background Music). Permission to build and distribute a playlist is not the same as your venue holding a public-performance right. Ask any vendor to confirm by name, in writing, what is covered for your premises specifically.

One last thing worth knowing about this question. Most of the advice you will find on it is published by companies that sell royalty-free music. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does mean the answer usually arrives with a product attached.

The subscription that doesn't cover you

A personal streaming subscription, even a paid one, does not license a venue to play music to customers. Spotify's End User Agreement grants only "limited, non-exclusive, revocable permission to make personal, non-commercial use of the Spotify Service and the Content", and bars redistributing or transferring the service to others (Spotify, End User Agreement). Licensing solicitors say the same thing in plainer language: "Hospitality venues cannot simply play music from their music streaming accounts such as Spotify" (Ella Evagora, Reed Smith LLP, Licensing of music in the UK hospitality industry). The licence is needed whichever app or device the music comes out of.

This one catches honest people. Paying £12.99 a month for Spotify Premium (Spotify, Premium UK pricing) feels like paying for music, which is exactly why it is worth saying out loud that it isn't.

Live music, DJs, karaoke and jukeboxes

Every use beyond quiet background music sits on its own tariff, and none of it is included in your background-music rate. A one-off live performance for up to 100 people is £15.11 for a restaurant or cafe and £14.64 for a pub, scaling from 15p per attendee (PPL PRS, Restaurants & Cafés; Pubs & Bars). A DJ or disco night, which PPL PRS classes as Specially Featured Entertainment, is £18.87 for up to 75 people for up to an hour, from 25p per attendee (PPL PRS, Live Events & Festivals).

Karaoke is the gap. PPL PRS publishes no headline figure for it, and prices it through its quote process, which is worth knowing before trusting a number you find elsewhere. The number of karaoke sessions you run is one of the things it asks about. Regular live music or a resident DJ moves you off the one-off event pricing too. If any of that describes your venue, start from the quote checklist rather than from your background-music budget with a few pounds added.

What it costs if you never got round to it

Starting late does not mean starting from today, and PPL PRS says the exposure runs to six years. Its own help pages are blunt about it: "If you have been playing or performing music before you obtain TheMusicLicence, we may include appropriate charges for prior music usage on your invoice." And then the scale of it: "Legally, business or organisations infringing copyright in this way can be liable to pay for up to six years' prior music use" (PPL PRS, Help). That is the shape of the exposure: up to six years of fees, rather than a fixed penalty. PPL PRS revises its rates annually, as the pub example did this year, so what six years actually adds up to depends on the rate in force for each of them.

What happens in practice starts much more gently than that. PPL PRS runs a public form for reporting premises playing music without a licence, so a competitor or a passer-by can start the process (PPL PRS, Report a Premises). Orange Jelly, drawing on cases it has supported operators through, describes the usual sequence: an initial letter or visit, a quick resolution if you comply and pay from the date you were contacted, and legal proceedings only once a venue keeps ignoring it (Orange Jelly, PRS and PPL Music Licensing for Pubs). If payment then stalls, PPL PRS says "you may be contacted by a specialist third party debt collection agency regarding payment of the outstanding balance", and that it may terminate the licence, "which may then lead to legal action for copyright infringement" (PPL PRS, Help).

That last step is not theoretical. In 2015 a High Court order required Bryan John, licensee of the Socialite Bar in Muswell Hill, north London, to pay PPL £19,000 in total, £4,000 in damages plus £15,000 in costs, after he kept playing unlicensed music following an earlier injunction. The court warned that continuing risked a 28-day prison sentence (Morning Advertiser, 9 November 2015). In 2017 a Plymouth pub run by licensee Mark David Newton was ordered to pay PRS £3,200 in costs and banned from playing copyrighted music there, or anywhere else he ran, until his licence was current (Morning Advertiser, 27 June 2017).

Ellis matters most if you are taking over an existing lease. The obligation follows whoever is playing the music in public, and that is not automatically the person named on the premises licence or the tenancy agreement. Confirm in writing who holds TheMusicLicence before assuming a predecessor's arrangement, or your landlord's, covers you.

If you already suspect you have been playing music unlicensed, or that a change of hands means yours lapsed, contacting PPL PRS first is a materially different conversation from waiting for the letter. It is a smaller version of the same "does this apply to me" question independent venues are being asked on several fronts this year. Our guide to Martyn's Law walks the same capacity-based diagnosis for the UK's new counter-terrorism duty, and is equally clear about when the honest answer is that you are out of scope.

What it looks like when you just sort it out

Operators who have been through the process tend to describe it as straightforward, and the benefit as freedom rather than a box ticked. Ian Martin, co-owner of The Real Ale Classroom, an independent micro-pub group with three sites across Leicester and Lutterworth, put it simply in a case study PPL PRS published about the pub: "Working with PPL PRS to get our music licence was really simple to sort out."

He frames the point of it as more than paperwork. "It's something that's important to us because we support lots of new bands and new DJ's here and I think it's important to make sure that, particularly in this digital world, that they do get that reward," he added. His co-owner, Steve Tabbernor, puts the practical upside more plainly: "Because we've got TheMusicLicence, we've got a bit of freedom to choose what we like" (PPL PRS, The Real Ale Classroom success story). Neither describes anything complicated, which matches the quote checklist: a handful of facts about the venue, not a lengthy application.

That freedom is useful in a less obvious way too. We have heard the same practical complaint from venue staff more than once: the same short playlist, day after day, becomes wearing when you are there for the whole shift. Regulars hear enough of it to notice as well. A broader rotation is a small way to keep the room fresher for the people who spend the most time in it.