Ask this question in Britain and America and you get opposite answers, which is a strange property for a question about a radio.
In the United States there is a genuine, free, statutory exemption that lets many small businesses play broadcast radio without paying anyone — it has been law since 1998, and it is real, and narrower than almost anyone repeats it.
In the United Kingdom there is no equivalent. Not a smaller version, not a harder-to-qualify-for version. The mechanism the American exemption relies on does not exist here at all.
A shop like this needs the same licence as a chain of gyms. Photograph: Ben Prater / Pexels.
The licence stops at the transmitter
Here is the sentence that does all the work, from PPL PRS, who issue the licence:
Although the radio stations pay both PPL and PRS for Music for the right to broadcast, it does not include playing the radio in public, such as business premises.
Read that twice, because the instinct it corrects is a reasonable one. The station paid. You are just receiving what the station sent. Surely the payment travelled with the signal?
It did not. What the station bought was the right to broadcast — to send the music out. Playing that broadcast into a room full of people is a second act, legally distinct from the first, and nobody has bought permission for it yet. The licence ends at the transmitter. Everything after that is yours.
GOV.UK puts the same point without the nuance, in a list of things that need a licence: "play recorded music in public or at your business (including background music on a CD, radio or music channel)". The venues it names are shops, offices, hairdressers, hotels, restaurants, pubs and gyms — which is to say, everyone.
"In public" does not mean what you think
This is the part that catches people who have already accepted the first part.
A café accepts it, because a café has customers. An office does not, because an office has only the people who work there, and surely a room with no public in it cannot host a public performance.
PPL PRS address this directly:
Music that's played outside of a domestic environment is classed as a public performance, even if the music can only be heard by employees in the staff areas in your business.
And, for offices, warehouses and factories specifically: "Even if you are only playing music in your office, warehouse, factories & other workplaces for employees, you'll usually need TheMusicLicence."
"Public" is a legal category, not a headcount. The line it draws is between domestic and non-domestic, not between busy and quiet. The kitchen radio in your house is domestic. The identical radio, on the identical station, on a shelf in your workshop, is not.
The back-room radio nobody thinks of as a business decision. Photograph: E M / Pexels.
Two organisations, one licence
The reason this feels more complicated than it should is that a recording contains two separate things, owned by two separate groups of people.
PPL distributes fees for the use of recorded music, on behalf of record companies and performers. PRS for Music distributes fees for the use of musical compositions and lyrics, on behalf of songwriters, composers and publishers.
The song and the recording of the song. Write a song and someone else records it, and the two of you hold different rights in what comes out of the speaker. Historically that meant two licences and two conversations. Since 2018 the two organisations have issued jointly, through PPL PRS Ltd, under the name TheMusicLicence — one licence, one payment, both rights.
The whole apparatus rests on the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which requires permission from the relevant copyright holders in order to play or perform music in public. Collecting societies exist because tracking down those holders song by song is impossible at the scale of a shop's playlist.
The station's licence covers the station. Your room is a second question, and it has always been yours to answer.
What this does not cover
Worth being precise about the edges, because a licence is not a blanket over everything audible on your premises.
A TV licence is a different instrument answering a different question. PPL PRS: "A TV licence only allows you to receive the broadcast signal for the television" — you will usually still need TheMusicLicence for the music inside the programmes.
Live performance, DJs and karaoke are their own arrangements. So is anything you publish: putting music behind a video your business posts is a synchronisation right, and no public-performance licence reaches it.
And GOV.UK notes one more thing, which is the quiet structural exception: "You do not need a licence to play royalty-free music." It also warns that where music is not managed by PPL PRS, another licensing body may be involved.
That last point is worth sitting with, because it explains the shape of the whole system rather than just its bill. Permission has to come from whoever holds the rights. Collecting societies exist because those rights are normally scattered across thousands of owners, and no shop could negotiate with all of them. Where the rights are not scattered — where one party wrote it, recorded it and owns it — the chain from that party to your room is short enough to walk.
The short version
The radio station's licence covers the radio station. It has never covered the room you play it in, and no size threshold in UK law changes that — the American exemption people half-remember is American. "In public" means outside a domestic setting, so a staff-only workroom counts. PPL and PRS for Music collect for two different rights in the same song and now issue jointly as TheMusicLicence. A TV licence answers a different question, and live music, DJs and video are separate again.
None of which makes the radio a bad idea. It makes it a decision with a price, which is different from the free thing it is usually assumed to be.
Sources, all quoted verbatim from the live pages and checked 10 September 2026: PPL PRS — TheMusicLicence, PPL PRS — Offices & Workplaces, GOV.UK — Get a licence to play live or recorded music. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here quotes a price: PPL PRS quote your specific premises, and that quote is the only figure that means anything.