How much is a PRS licence for a cafe? UK music licence guide
What a UK cafe music licence really costs in 2026, why a personal Spotify account will not do, and how to schedule the sound by daypart — licensing, real pricing, and the research in one place.
Most UK cafes that play recorded music where customers can hear it need TheMusicLicence, which bundles PPL and PRS into one annual payment.
PPL PRS's own January 2026 example prices a café of up to 30 seats in 400 m² or less at £400.81 + VAT a year for background music, scaling with floor area, seating, devices, staff, and hours.
A personal Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube account is licensed for private listening only and never covers playing to customers.
The music itself is a separate job — schedule it by daypart, because tempo and volume measurably change how long people stay and what they order.
Sonosfera-only playback does not require a PPL or PRS licence, because its catalogue is fully AI-generated and rights-controlled — but that covers Sonosfera's own tracks only, not Spotify, radio, DJs, or live music.
Sonosfera was started by a salon operator who got caught out by PPL/PRS licensing letters and built the music platform they wished existed. The team behind this blog has spent years inside hair and beauty businesses, clinics, and hospitality venues — booking the bills, dealing with the licensing letters, and learning the hard way that most Spotify playlists don't work for a professional environment.
How much is a PRS licence for a cafe? UK music licence guide
By Sonosfera Team
Running music in a cafe is really two jobs that owners mistake for one. The first is legal: you need the right to play recorded music where customers can hear it. The second is practical: the same soundtrack has to suit an 8am commuter queue, a 2pm laptop table, and a slow evening service — which one shuffled playlist never does. Most people nail the vibe by instinct and trip over the paperwork, or pay for a licence and then run the room on a personal Spotify account that was never allowed in the first place.
This guide covers both halves honestly: what TheMusicLicence actually costs in 2026 with real, dated figures, why consumer streaming is a trap, the research on what music does to spending and dwell time, and how to schedule the sound so it earns its place across the day. It is written for independent UK cafe and coffee-shop owners setting music up for the first time — or quietly wondering whether the setup they inherited is legal. It is general guidance, not legal advice for unusual cases such as live bands, ticketed events, broadcasting, or uploading music to your own channels.
Two verified numbers anchor the money side, both current as of early 2026:
The money question
Figure
Source
TheMusicLicence — background music, café up to 30 seats in ≤400 m²
Everything below explains where those numbers come from and which route fits your room.
The two rights you are actually paying for
When a track plays in your cafe, two sets of rights holders are owed money: the songwriters and publishers, represented in the UK by PRS for Music, and the performers and record labels, represented by PPL. Since 2018 the two collect together through PPL PRS Ltd under a single product, TheMusicLicence, so most cafes now make one annual payment covering both rather than chasing two separate agreements.
That is why you used to hear about "a PRS licence and a PPL licence" as if they were two errands. The UK Intellectual Property Office is blunt about the underlying rule: businesses that play music in public normally need permission from the relevant collecting societies. TheMusicLicence packages that permission — composition rights (PRS) and recording rights (PPL) — into one bill administered jointly. You can read exactly what it includes at pplprs.co.uk.
Do you actually need one?
For a typical cafe, yes. Playing recorded music where customers can hear it is a "public performance" under UK copyright law, and that triggers the licensing requirement — whether the source is radio, a streaming app, a CD, a TV, or a dedicated background system. A back-office radio that only staff can hear is a greyer area worth confirming with PPL PRS directly rather than assuming either way.
The costliest misunderstanding is the personal-streaming one. A consumer Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, or YouTube subscription does not cover business use — Spotify's own support material is explicit that personal accounts are for private, non-commercial listening. Your subscription pays the streaming service; it does not buy the public-performance rights PPL and PRS administer. Two things follow. A consumer account never replaces TheMusicLicence, even if every track is "paid for" in your app. And using one for customer-facing playback can breach that service's own terms, separately from the licensing gap. The clean setup keeps the two jobs apart: a music source built and licensed for business, plus the correct public-performance licence.
If you think a narrow exception might apply to your setup — some very specific live TV or radio situations exist — confirm it directly with PPL PRS rather than guessing, because they are easy to get wrong.
What a cafe music licence costs in 2026
There is no single flat price, but PPL PRS does publish worked examples, which is more useful than the vague "it depends" most guides give you. As of January 2026 its restaurants-and-cafés page prices background music for a venue of up to 30 seats in 400 m² or less at £400.81 + VAT a year — about £1.10 a day. The fee is annual, paid upfront, and rises with your audible floor area, seat count, the devices you use, staff numbers, and opening hours.
So a small independent espresso bar and a large multi-room cafe-bar pay very different amounts, and the tariffs are adjusted for inflation each year — treat that £400.81 as a reference point for one specific venue shape, not your bill. Get the exact figure for your premises from the music licence cost calculator at pplprs.co.uk. Two practical notes worth banking:
Pricing is per premises, so multiple sites usually mean multiple fees.
Getting licensed proactively is cheaper than being contacted afterward — a business caught playing music before it holds a licence is typically charged its first year at the standard rate plus a 50% surcharge.
The alternative: catalogue-scoped and royalty-free services
A second route sidesteps the collecting-society fee for one specific catalogue. Some background-music providers stream only royalty-free, original, or AI-generated tracks they already control the rights to, so playing that catalogue does not attract a separate PPL or PRS charge. "Royalty-free" does not mean free of charge — you pay the provider a subscription — and the cover applies only to that provider's own music, never to anything else you also play.
It helps to see the market as two camps. Mainstream-catalogue platforms (Soundtrack Your Brand, and consumer apps generally) give you recognisable chart music but tell you plainly that public-performance rights still apply — you keep TheMusicLicence. Royalty-free and original or AI-generated libraries (Background Sounds, and services built the same way) trade the Top 40 for a curated, licence-clean catalogue and remove the collecting-society fee for their own tracks. Background Sounds, for example, publishes £150 + VAT a year or £15 + VAT a month for its royalty-free subscription.
Neither camp is "better" in the abstract: it depends on whether you need chart familiarity, which requires the licence, or predictable licence-clean background sound, which is subscription-only. Whichever you pick, read the provider's certificate or licensing page and keep a copy — and remember the cover never stretches to a Spotify playlist, the radio, a DJ, or live music you run alongside it. You can line the options up on /compare/uk.
Where Sonosfera fits
Sonosfera is a background-music service built for rooms like cafes, where the goal is a calm, consistent atmosphere rather than the Top 40. Sonosfera-only playback does not require a PPL or PRS licence, because the catalogue is fully AI-generated and rights-controlled rather than drawn from commercial record labels. You pay one subscription for music cleared for commercial play instead of managing a chart source plus a separate licence.
The boundary matters, so here it is in plain terms: that position covers the Sonosfera catalogue only. It does not retroactively cover a Spotify playlist, the radio, a DJ set, live music, or third-party tracks you also play — each of those carries its own rules, and TheMusicLicence applies to that activity. If a single predictable monthly cost for in-cafe music is what you want, you can review country-aware pricing and compare it against the alternatives above.
The other half: choosing and scheduling the music
Now the part licensing never answers — what actually plays, and when.
Does music really change what customers do?
Yes, though as an influence rather than a guaranteed lever. In Ronald Milliman's 1986 field study of 1,392 restaurant dining parties, slow-tempo music (around 72 BPM or below) kept guests at the table roughly a quarter longer than fast-tempo music (around 92 BPM or above); food spend barely moved, but bar and beverage spend rose. His earlier 1982 supermarket experiment linked slower music to roughly 38% higher sales volume.
The lesson for a cafe is not "play slow music to make more money." It is that tempo and volume shape the pace of the room, and one fixed playlist cannot serve a commuter queue, a lunch rush, and a laptop afternoon at once. Volume does more work than owners expect: a musically tasteful playlist still fails if staff have to shout over it. A useful ceiling is the roughly 70 dB(A) at which two people across a small table start raising their voices — background music should sit under that. Low-vocal, lyric-light tracks help during study and remote-work periods; warmer, more familiar music suits a sociable brunch. Match the sound to what the customer is trying to do, then test it by standing at the counter, at the door, and at a table — if one track feels too loud in one spot and too quiet in another, that is a speaker-placement problem, not a playlist one.
The four-block daypart framework
The simplest working structure splits the trading day into four blocks, each with one job: open soft and warm, add motion through lunch, protect dwell time in the afternoon, and let the evening turn intimate. Treat the tempo and volume figures below as tuned starting points, not fixed laws — adjust them by ear to your own trade and room.
Make the room feel intentional and a little intimate
Jazz tones, tango jazz, mellow lounge, slower tracks
70–90 BPM
58–64 dB(A)
Dayparting is an old discipline with new tools. The mid-century jukebox changed the mood only when a customer paid to pick a song; today a single consumer playlist on shuffle recreates that same flat wash from open to close, just automatically. If your current setup is one playlist all day, the first upgrade is not a bigger library — it is a schedule. Pick three to six reference tracks per block before filling out the rest, and if staff keep skipping a stretch, rotate that block before it becomes fatigue.
Your cafe music checklist
Run this before you open a new site or change your setup:
Confirm whether you need TheMusicLicence — most customer-facing cafes do if customers can hear recorded music — and get it from PPL PRS.
Check your exact tariff on the official pages before budgeting; don't rely on a figure from a blog.
Stop using any personal Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube account for customer-facing playback.
Move to a music source that is licensed for business use.
Build the four daypart blocks before adding niche genres.
Set a simple per-moment volume habit so staff can run it without you.
Keep your licence paperwork and any provider certificate on file, in case PPL PRS ever asks what you play.
A few remaining questions
What is the actual difference between PPL and PRS?
PPL collects for the recording — the record label and the performers on the specific track you press play on. PRS for Music collects for the people who wrote the song: composers, songwriters, and publishers. A single public performance can engage both rights at once, which is exactly why the UK now bundles them into one TheMusicLicence rather than billing you twice. You deal with PPL PRS Ltd, their 2018 joint venture, for both.
Does a back-office radio only staff can hear need a licence?
It is a grey area rather than a clear yes. A cafe dining room where customers can hear music is unambiguously a public performance; a radio playing solely to staff in a back room is less clear-cut and turns on the specific circumstances. Rather than assume in either direction, describe your exact setup to PPL PRS and get their position before you rely on it — the cost of asking is nothing.
If I open a second cafe, does one licence cover both?
No. TheMusicLicence is priced per premises, so a second site normally means a second fee, calculated on that venue's own floor area, seating, and usage. The same logic applies to a catalogue subscription such as Sonosfera or a royalty-free provider — check whether the plan is per location. Budget each new site separately rather than assuming your existing licence stretches to cover it.
Pick your single busiest hour this week and fix that one block first: write down what customers are actually doing — queuing, working, lingering — set the tempo and volume to match, and confirm your licence position on the official PPL PRS pages while you are at it. Once that hour feels right, extend the same logic across the other three dayparts. If you would rather not build and licence a catalogue yourself, music for cafes is the cafe-specific starting point, with country-aware pricing you can weigh against the figures above.
