Background music licensing explained for businesses

Playing music where customers can hear it is a public performance. That is true whether the speaker sits behind a till, above a hotel lobby or in a gym studio, and it is the reason a personal Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube account cannot legally power a business. The subscription you pay at home buys you a personal, non-commercial right to listen. The moment the same account plays in a venue, the terms of service are breached and the performance is unlicensed.

The two rights behind every track

Every recorded song contains two separate copyrights, owned by different parties:

• The composition — the melody and lyrics, owned by the songwriter and their publisher.
• The recording — the specific recorded performance, owned by the artist's label and the performers.

Collecting societies license those rights on behalf of writers, publishers, performers and labels, collecting royalties when music is performed publicly. A business music service clears both rights for commercial use, so the venue is covered for everything it plays during trading hours. This dual clearance is what a personal streaming account can never provide, no matter how it is used.

Why personal streaming apps are the wrong tool

The licensing problem is only the first issue. Personal apps fail a business in four practical ways:

• Their terms of service restrict playback to personal, non-commercial use — the account itself can be terminated.
• Adverts and algorithmic recommendations interrupt the brand experience you paid to design.
• There is no zoning, scheduling, volume control or central management across rooms or sites.
• Nobody is accountable when someone in authority asks who licensed the music.

What an inspector actually asks for

Enforcement is usually quiet and administrative rather than dramatic. A representative of a collecting society visits or writes to the venue and asks a simple question: who licenses the public performance of music here? The venues that struggle are not the ones playing obscure music — they are the ones who cannot produce an answer in writing.

A compliant venue can show a current licence or a service agreement covering both rights, naming the premises. A compliant multi-site group can show it per location. That documentation is the entire test, and it is either trivially easy or genuinely expensive depending on how the music was set up.

Licensing in Dubai and the UAE

The UAE is not a licensing vacuum. Music played publicly in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the other emirates sits under the same international copyright framework as anywhere else, and international collecting societies are active in the region. For hotel groups, mall operators and retail estates, the practical answer is the same as in London or Singapore: use a commercial music service whose catalogue is cleared for business use in your territory, and keep the written confirmation on file per site.

Questions to ask any provider

• Is the catalogue fully licensed for commercial public performance in the UAE, in writing?
• Which territories are covered as we expand — and where does coverage stop?
• Who is accountable if a collecting society contacts one of our venues?
• Is licensing bundled with the curation, or contracted separately?

With Araya, the licensing and the curation sit with one accountable partner, so nothing falls between vendors. If you are running more than one location, ask for a written summary of what is covered per territory before you scale — it is a five-minute conversation that avoids an expensive one later.