Music licensing · A plain reading
Can I play Spotify in my business? The law, read properly.
No. Spotify’s Terms of Use grant only “personal, non-commercial” use, and Spotify’s own support documentation says the service cannot be played publicly in bars, restaurants, stores or salons. Playing music for customers is a public performance under 17 U.S.C. §106(4), requiring a licence from one of five performing rights organisations. The small-business exemption you may have heard about covers FCC-licensed radio broadcasts — not streaming. Statutory damages run $750 to $150,000 per work.
By Jesse Meria · Last updated
Every legal claim below is quoted from the statute and linked to its source.
You have two problems, not one
Almost every article on this subject blurs two entirely separate things, and the blur is why the answer never quite lands. Keep them apart and the whole system snaps into focus.
The first is a contract. You agreed to Spotify’s terms, and those terms license personal listening. Breaking that agreement is between you and Spotify, and the worst realistic outcome is a closed account.
The second is copyright law, and it has nothing to do with Spotify at all. It would apply identically if you were playing a CD you bought in 1994. This is the one with teeth, and it is the one nobody explains, because explaining it properly means admitting that the vendor selling you the fix is not the party you were ever at risk from.
Here is the sentence that does the work, from 17 U.S.C. §106: the copyright owner holds the exclusive right “to perform the copyrighted work publicly.” Not to sell it. Not to broadcast it. To perform it. And §101 defines performing publicly as performing “at a place open to the public.” Your dining room is a place open to the public. That is the entire mechanism.
What Spotify actually says
No interpretation required. This is the company describing its own product, in its own contract, revised August 26, 2025.
Spotify Terms of Use §3 — Access to the Spotify Service
“Subject to your compliance with these Terms (including any other applicable terms and conditions), we grant to you limited, non-exclusive, revocable permission to make personal, non-commercialuse of the Spotify Service and the Content”
Spotify Support — “Spotify for public or commercial use”
“Spotify is only for personal, non-commercial use.” — and it names where you cannot play it: “bars, restaurants, schools, stores, salons, dance studios, radio stations, etc.”
A precision worth having: the contract itself contains no standalone “no public performance” clause. The restriction operates through the narrowness of the grant — permission was only ever given for personal use, so commercial use was never granted in the first place. The blunt sentence about bars and restaurants lives on the support page.
Is there a Spotify for Business plan?
There is not. Spotify operates no business tier; its support page sends commercial users to a separate company entirely. This matters more than it sounds, because a surprising number of pages — and, at the time of writing, some AI-generated answers — will quote you a confident monthly price for a product that does not exist. If you have been told to “just upgrade to the business plan,” there is nothing to upgrade to.
And paying more would not have helped anyway. The problem was never the size of your subscription. A consumer music subscription — any of them — buys you the right to listen. It has never conveyed the right to perform. Those are different rights, sold to different buyers, and no amount of the first adds up to the second.
The exemption that counts your speakers
In 1998, after sustained lobbying from the restaurant industry, Congress passed the Fairness in Music Licensing Act. It carved a hole in the public performance right for small businesses, and the hole is specified in a way that is genuinely strange to read: in square feet, in loudspeakers, and in inches of screen diagonal.
Nearly every article that mentions this exemption gets its structure wrong, stating the size and the equipment limits as though a business must satisfy both. It must not. They are alternatives — and which branch you land in changes the answer completely.
That last panel is the part that matters, and it is why this exemption misleads so many people who read about it correctly. The Congressional Research Service put the consequence plainly in report RS21107: the exemptions
“do not authorize an establishment to originate its own broadcasts of copyrighted material… an establishment may play the radio or show a television broadcast without violating copyright law, but the act still does not shield the same business when it plays, for example, CDs protected by the copyright laws.”
Swap “CDs” for “a playlist” and you have the situation in most cafés in America. The exemption is real, it is generous, and it protects a behaviour almost nobody under forty engages in.
So what actually happens?
Here is where most writing on this topic reaches for a number designed to frighten you, and where we are going to do something less dramatic and more useful: tell you how the enforcement actually works, because the mechanism is far more informative than the maximum penalty.
The numbers first, since they are real. 17 U.S.C. §504(c) sets statutory damages at “not less than $750 or more than $30,000” per work— reducible to $200 where the infringer genuinely did not know, and increasable to $150,000 where the infringement was willful. Section 505 lets the court add costs and attorney’s fees, which in cases this size routinely exceed the damages themselves.
Note per work, not per play. Playing one song five hundred times is one work. An evening’s playlist is many.
But the honest answer to “what happens” is not a number, it is a cadence. There is no system watching your speakers. No algorithm detects a consumer account playing to a room. Enforcement is complaint-driven and representative-driven: someone from a licensing organisation physically visits, or hears about you, and then writes. And writes. And calls.
In one suit filed in March 2026, the licensing organisation stated it had contacted the venue’s owner more than eighty times over three years before filing anything. That is the actual shape of the risk, and it is worth understanding correctly: you are overwhelmingly unlikely to be ambushed. You are quite likely, if you ignore enough letters, to eventually be sued. The businesses that end up in court are almost never the ones who did not know. They are the ones who stopped opening the envelopes.
Three ways out, honestly
We make one of these. We will describe all three properly anyway, because a page that only explains the option it sells is not an explanation, it is an advertisement wearing one.
1. Actually play the radio
The exemption is free and it is real. Tune an FCC-licensed broadcast station, stay inside the size or equipment branch, do not charge admission to hear it, do not pipe it beyond your establishment, and you owe nothing. You also accept the radio: other people’s ad breaks, other people’s DJs, and no say over what plays when your room is full.
2. Buy blanket licences from the performing rights organisations
This is the traditional route and it is entirely legitimate. Five organisations license US businesses — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR and AllTrack — and each represents a different set of writers. Because co-written songs split shares across them, broad coverage generally means more than one licence. In exchange you can play more or less any commercial music ever recorded, which is a genuinely enormous thing to be able to do. Costs vary by size, occupancy and whether you host live music; ask them directly rather than trusting a number on a page like this one.
3. Play music whose owner can license you directly
The reason blanket licences exist is scale: ordinary catalogues contain millions of works owned by millions of parties, and no café could clear them one at a time. A catalogue with a single owner inverts that problem. There is one party to ask, so the public performance right can simply be included in the subscription. This is what Puana is, and the next section is the honest version of what that does and does not get you.
Where we come into it
One owner. One licence. Included.
Puana’s catalogue is original music we own outright — composed by us, rendered with Suno under a continuous commercial licence, stored and distributed by us. That provenance is documented, with receipts, on our licence page. We would rather you check it than take our word for it.
Because there is one rights holder, the public performance right comes with the subscription. In our terms it reads: a “non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable commercial public-performance licence for the locations and devices specified by your active subscription.”
And the things a fair reading requires us to say
- It covers our music only. If you also run a TV, host live musicians, keep a jukebox, or let staff put a personal playlist on, you still need cover for that music.
- It is revocable and tied to an active subscription. Stop subscribing and the licence stops with it.
- Every location must be registered. Playing at more sites than you have registered breaches the licence.
- It does not cover rebroadcasting, webcasting, or syncing our music into video you publish.
Nothing on this page is legal advice. If real money rides on a specific decision, a media or IP attorney is the right call.
Going deeper
Can I play the radio in my business without a licence?
Often yes — the exemption is real and free. But it works nothing like people think, and it stops the moment you switch to a playlist.
ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR, AllTrack: what they actually license
Five organisations, not three. Why one licence is rarely enough, and what changed when private equity bought two of them.
Questions people actually ask
Can I play Spotify in my business?
No. Spotify's Terms of Use grant only "personal, non-commercial" use, and Spotify's own support documentation states the service cannot be played publicly in bars, restaurants, schools, stores, salons or dance studios. Paying for Premium does not change this — no consumer tier conveys commercial rights.
Is there a Spotify for Business plan I can upgrade to?
No. Spotify operates no business tier. Its support page directs commercial users to a separate company. Any page quoting you a monthly price for "Spotify for Business" is describing a product that does not exist.
Does it matter that I own the CD, or that I paid for the subscription?
No. Owning a copy of music conveys no right to perform it publicly. Under 17 U.S.C. §106(4) the copyright owner holds the exclusive right of public performance, and §101 defines a performance as public when it occurs at a place open to the public. The source of the music is irrelevant.
My shop is under 2,000 square feet — am I exempt?
Possibly, but almost certainly not in the way you think. The exemption at 17 U.S.C. §110(5)(B) applies only to transmissions originated by an FCC-licensed radio or television broadcast station. It covers playing the radio. It does not cover a streaming service or a playlist you curated, at any square footage.
How many speakers can I have before I need a music licence?
The six-speaker limit only binds establishments at or above the size threshold — 3,750 gross square feet for food service and drinking establishments, 2,000 for other businesses. Below that threshold the statute imposes no equipment limit at all. Above it, the cap is 6 loudspeakers total and no more than 4 in any one room.
Which performing rights organisations license businesses in the US?
Five: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR and AllTrack. Each represents a different set of writers, and co-written songs routinely split shares across them, which is why a single licence rarely covers a full catalogue.
What are the penalties for playing music without a licence?
Statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. §504(c) run from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, reducible to $200 for genuinely innocent infringement and increasable to $150,000 for willful infringement. Section 505 also allows the court to award costs and attorney's fees, which in small cases often exceed the damages themselves.
What can I legally play in my business instead?
Three honest routes: license the radio route by actually playing an FCC-licensed broadcast station within the exemption's conditions; buy blanket licences from the performing rights organisations; or use a service whose catalogue is owned by a single rights holder who can grant the public performance right directly in the subscription.
Sources: 17 U.S.C. §§101, 106, 110, 504 and 505 (Legal Information Institute); Congressional Research Service report RS21107; Spotify Terms of Use, revised August 26, 2025. Verified July 29, 2026. Music licensing changes; if you are reading this long after that date, check the statute yourself — we link it above for exactly that reason.